Phillip Pitschi

Georg Jank, Mattia Piccinini, Sebastian Wenk et al.

Feedforward steering control is a key component of hierarchical control architectures for autonomous racing. The goal is to reduce steering corrections from the feedback controllers by predicting the vehicle's inverse lateral dynamics. This paper presents a systematic benchmark of two learning-based and two empirical (analytical) feedforward steering controllers. We introduce a new \acf{ehd} formulation based on a polynomial surface fit that captures velocity-dependent nonlinear steering behavior with minimal parametrization. We test the feedforward controllers in a high-fidelity simulation framework based on the real-world Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League competition, using a high-fidelity double-track vehicle dynamics simulator. Open-loop evaluation shows that the learning-based controllers achieve the lowest prediction errors; however, closed-loop testing reveals that this improved accuracy does not translate into superior path tracking performance or lap times, even after iterative fine-tuning. In contrast, the proposed EHD approach achieves the best overall closed-loop robustness and lap time, highlighting the necessity of evaluating feedforward strategies within the complete trajectory planning and control software stack. Our code is available at https://github.com/TUMRT/steering_ff_control.

Simon Sagmeister, Marcel Weinmann, Phillip Pitschi et al.

Simulation is crucial in real-world robotics, offering safe, scalable, and efficient environments for developing a variety of robotic applications. While the Robot Operating System (ROS) has been widely adopted as the backbone of these robotic applications in both academia and industry, its asynchronous, multi-process design complicates reproducibility, especially across varying hardware platforms. Deterministic callback execution cannot be guaranteed when computation times and communication delays vary. This lack of reproducibility complicates scientific benchmarking and continuous integration, where consistent results are essential. To address this, we present a methodology to create deterministic simulations using ROS 2 nodes. Our ROS Simulation Library for C++ (RSLCPP) implements this approach, enabling existing nodes to be combined into a simulation routine that yields reproducible results, usually without requiring any source code changes. We demonstrate that our approach produces identical results across various CPUs and architectures when testing both a synthetic benchmark and a real-world robotics system. RSLCPP is open-sourced at https://github.com/TUMFTM/rslcpp.