The analysis of the Stanley's controller performance in the presence of the steering angle disturbances

Abstract

Currently, autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) are making a noticeable appearance in the publicity and various possible benefits of the autonomous technologies are being widely discussed. While taking into consideration these possible benefits, in the society it is assumed that the AGVs should positively improve the traffic safety by reducing the number of accidents, increase the mobility for various social groups of people, reduce traffic congestion and emissions, etc. The actual realisation of such benefits is a major motivation to accelerate the development and research of the AGVs technologies. Respectively, while seeking to ensure a safe and accurate autonomous movement of the vehicle, a properly tuned controller plays a crucial role. However, a proper tuning of a controller for various driving conditions in most cases becomes a very complex task, which requires specific knowledge about the performance of the selected control law. Due to above mentioned reason, this research presents the detailed analysis of the Stanley’s controller performance in the presence of the autonomous vehicle steering angle disturbances. The performed analysis is based on the theoretical simulations, which considers different Stanley’s controller gain parameter values, different sizes of the steering angle disturbances, different movement trajectories and velocities of the autonomous vehicle. Thus, the presented analysis describes the relation between the velocity of the autonomous vehicle, the Stanley’s controller gain parameter, the output parameter, i.e., the steering angle values, generated by the Stanley’s controller, and the path tracking errors. The results of this analysis can be successfully applied, while developing a tuning approach for the Stanley’s controller.