Combined road following control and automatic lane keeping for automated guided vehicles
Kawther Osman, Jawhar Ghommam, Maarouf Saad · 2016
The paper addresses the operational reliability and safety of automated guided vehicles along roadways. These operations most often require very tight integration of environmental sensing and vehicle dynamics control. This contribution relies on determining the relevant lane boundaries using conventional camera sensor and proposes a constrained longitudinal and lateral control strategy for fully automated guided vehicle (AGV) which dynamics are described by a nonlinear nonholonomic model with two inputs, the rear axle torque and the steering angle torque. The objective is to control the AGV to track a desired generated trajectory while preventing lane departure. Aiming at this purpose, a vision-based algorithm is used to determine the boundaries of road lanes with respect to the vehicle, a reference trajectory within these lane boundaries is then generated based on Hermite basis functions. The control inputs for the AGV are subsequently designed in such a way it tracks the given trajectory while its position remains in the lane boundaries. The Integral Barrier Lyapunov functionals (iBLFs) are employed to address the AGV position constraints to ensure safe autonomous navigation. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.