Lateral Path Tracking Control of Autonomous Land Vehicle Based on ADRC and Differential Flatness Yuanging Xia, Member, IEEE, Fan Pu, Shengfei Li and Yuan Gao Abstract—This paper presents a tracking control method for ‘he lateral motion of an Autonomous Land Vehicle, This method is based on active disturbance rejection control scheme and differential fat . The lateral motion is hard to control since large uncertainties By making a small-angle approximation, the dynamic model is inearized. The flatness of the linear model is proved and a flat ‘output is found. An equivalent form of the model is obtained based on the flat output and its derivatives only. Moreover, an active disturbance rejection controller is adopted to guarantee both conteol accuracy and strong robustness. Simulation results are presented and the results show the effectiveness ofthe control strategies. Index Terms—Lateral path tracking, underactuated, active disturbance rejection contro, diferential flatness 1. IntRopveTION HE lateral control of an Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALY) mainly depends on the feedback information from vision system [I], Global Positioning System and inertial ‘measurement units [2] to realize the function of tracking the desired trajectories automatically under different speeds, road conditions, loads, wind resistances ete In the past, lateral path tracking control was simply con- sidered as controlling the steering to keep the vehicle in its lane and also follow the lane when it curves. Many works also have been done to solve this kind of lane tacking problem, ‘Simple state feedback control was introduced in [3] to make a vehicle stay in the center of its lane. [4] used a 3-layer ‘back-propagation network (@ realize road following. Vehicle location estimation and quadratic pattern classifier were used to realize person following and avoid collision with obstacles, at the same time [5]. Fuzzy controller with a parameter self- tuning modules was proposed to adjust the quantization factor and scale factor according to current velocity and heading declination [6]. However, yaw stability control was more and more impor- tant in nowadays since dangerous, undesirable raw motion ‘Manuscript received September 5, 2014; revised June 6, 2015 and Avgust 5, 2015; accepted January 27, 2016, Copyright (6) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this maleil is peamited. However, persion to use ts taecial for anyother purposee must be obtined ftom the TEBE by sending a equet co pubs-pemsissions @iee rg ‘he authors would Ule to thank the reeves for thelr valble and Sppoted by the National Base Reseach Program of China (973 Pro tram) (20198720000, the National NatralSetenee Foundation of China (61225015), Foundaton for Innovative Reseateh Groupe of the National [Natl Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61321002} ‘Yonging Xia, Fan Po, Shenglei Li ané Yuan Gao are with the School of Automaton, Beijing Taste of Techbology. Beling. PR. China, 100081. (email xia yuanging@biceduen,pufanv?3@gmlleon lishengfeiadhetpmal com, gaoyuanst8 gral com). aeoue (218 EEE. Pres wiped bt pied gi TEE prion. Se pin panne sandnhpaighsnde may cause the vehicle spinning or just drifting out in certain conditions, Various control methods can be found in literature about yaw angle contol. [7] used lateral tre force sensors to estimate vehicle sideslip angle to improve the yaw motion stability. A fuzzy logic based yaw stability controller was designed in [8]. A robust steering controller was proposed in the parameter space to satisfy a frequency-domain mixed sensitivity constraint in [9] ‘Therefore, system considering both lateral displacement and. yaw angle synchronously has important practical significance, However, few achievements were obtained since the system is underactuated. In this paper, the precise control of displace- ment and yaw angle simultaneously of an intelligent vebicle is achieved based on the differential flainess theory and active disturbance rejection control (ADRC). Fliess M, Levine J, Martin P and Rouchon P firstly proposed the concept of differential fatness in [10]. The concept of differential flatness is that « system is flat when it is equiv. alent to linear ones via a special type of feedback called endogenous. With differential flatness, complex integration process is no longer needed. This feature makes flatness a tool to solve various problems. In [11], differeatial flatness ‘was combined with backstepping-based state-feedback control and feed forward control to deal with a linear diffusion- convection-reaction system with varying parameters and non- linear boundary input. Since the system is differentially fat luajectory was generated by designing it in the flat output space first [12]. In [13], differential flatness combined with SMC is proposed to stabilize the error dynamics in view of unmodeled dynamics. The theory can also be used to solve the underactuated problems. In [14], the author applied flatness to realize the optimal motion planning of an underactuated rigid spacecraft, The problem that not all joint trajectories are attainable is solved in [15] ‘Active disturbance rejection controller is a novel controller which is proposed by Han in in 1990s [16]. ADRC main- tains the kemel of classic PID control and behaves much better in rejecting the disturbances actively, The controller ccan automatically estimate the internal model uncertainties and the external disturbances and then compensate them [17] [18]. In order to estimate the uncertainties and disturbances only according to the input and output, a new and significant notion of the extended state observer (ESO) was proposed [19] (20] [21]. Furthermore, other two methods are also used. to improve the performance of the controller: the tracking differentiator (TD) [22] and the nonlinear feedback controller [23], With the properties of less dependency on model and strong robustness, the ideas of ADRC have been used in more and more areas [24] [25] [26]. Furthermore. some importanttheoretical justifications have been achieved in both time domain [27] and frequency domain [28] [29], ‘The main contributions of this paper are summarized as below: i The fatness of the “bicycle” model is proved. A. differential lat output F is found, ii According to that, an equivalent form of the system is obtained which is in terms of F and its derivatives only. Therefore, the underactuate problem can be solved iii An active disturbance rejection controller is adopted to guarantee both control accuracy and strong robust- ‘The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In Section If, a “bicycle” model for an ALY is introduced. In Section IIL, a lat output F is found and the equivalent system based on F and its derivatives is oblained. In Section IV, active disturbance rejection controller is designed based on the equivalent system and then parameters tuning is presented. ‘Simulation results are shown in Section V. Finally, Section VI summarizes the paper Il, LATERAL VEHICLE DYNAMICS ‘An Autonomous Land Vehicle is a complex, nonlinear and uncertain system with many unknown disturbances, The dy namic model which is hard to obtain accurately is complicated and highly nonlinear. The dynamic model for lateral motion based on (30) is developed in this paper. ‘Make the following assumptions I Ignore the longitudinal force generated by the tires; TH Longitudinal velocity is high enough so that slip angles cannot be ignored; I The slip angles are so small thatthe lateral tire forces are proportional to the slip angles; IV The vehicle uses only front wheels to steer. Under the assumptions described above and regarding the dynamic characteristics at both sides as symmettical, a "bicy- cle” model of the vehicle with two degrees of freedom is used instead, as shown in Fig.1 O(0) Fig. 1. The “icyle” model of ALV aeoue (218 EEE. Pres wiped bt pied gi TEE prion. Se pin panne sandnhpaighsnde In Fig.l, XOY represents the coordinate system based fon the earth while roy represents the coordinate system of vehicle, Both of these coordinate systems are right-handed Fig.2 shows the lateral vehicle dynamics with two degrees of freedom of the model. 44 ‘The model can be writen as below (3] gee ty = 8 Far + Fe) (Fests ~ Fool) os where, vq! longitudinal velocity in zoy; vyt lateral velocity in zoy) lateral displacement in XOY; lateral velocity in XOY yaw angle eri vehicle yaw rate Fyy:_ lateral tie force of front wheel Fry: lateral tire force of rear wheel; Cy: front tire comering stiffness; Cy: rear tire comering stifiness; Ij: distance between the center of gravity and the front Ih: distance between the center of gravity and the rear axle; mi vehicle mass; Te: yaw moment of inertia, ‘With Assumption IIL, the following relationship is obtained. between tire force and tire slip angle [31] By =~Cy0s Fy =—Cray where, ay and a, are respectively the slip angle at the front and rear tres. With the physical explanation of slip angle, the ‘equations is obtained below. 2 where 4, is front wheel steering angle