Longitudinal-Motion-Aware Lateral Control for Autonomous Vehicles: A Robust Nonlinear Control Framework
For autonomous vehicle lateral control, this work addresses the practical issue of performance degradation during transient longitudinal maneuvers and parameter uncertainty, offering a robust solution with real-time feasibility.
This paper proposes a longitudinal-motion-aware robust nonlinear lateral control framework for autonomous vehicles that accounts for varying speed and acceleration and parametric uncertainties. Simulations and real-vehicle tests demonstrate enhanced tracking accuracy and robustness, with consistent performance across varying speeds and accelerations.
As autonomous vehicles (AVs) operate in increasingly dynamic traffic conditions, lateral control must be performed while longitudinal speed and acceleration vary. Yet many existing lateral controllers rely on constant-speed or operating-point-based assumptions, which can degrade performance during transient longitudinal maneuvers. Moreover, most methods assume precisely known vehicle parameters, despite real-world parametric uncertainties. To address these limitations, this paper presents a longitudinal-motion-aware robust nonlinear lateral control framework for AVs. It first derives a tracking error model that depends on varying longitudinal speed and acceleration. Using this model, feedback linearization is employed to obtain a linear input-output relation for lateral error tracking while embedding longitudinal motion into the control law. The resulting internal dynamics are then analyzed to ensure overall system stability. To address parameter uncertainty, two robust control designs with distinct implementation trade-offs are proposed: (i) a Lyapunov redesign (LR) approach inspired by sliding mode control, and (ii) an incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) method. Both are rigorously analyzed and proven to ensure ultimate boundedness, with key robustness-tuning parameters explicitly identified. Simulations demonstrate enhanced tracking accuracy, consistent performance across varying speeds and accelerations, and robustness to model uncertainties, while also examining the effects of the robustness-related parameters. Real-vehicle tests further confirm real-time implementation and practical path-tracking performance on actual hardware.