Passivity Analysis and Design of a Robust Nested Passivity-Based Controller for Trajectory Tracking of Autonomous Vehicles

This paper focuses on the lateral control of intelligent vehicles. The aim is to minimize the lateral displacement of the autonomous vehicle with respect to a given reference trajectory. The control input is the steering angle and the output is the lateral error displacement. After passivity analysis of the system to establish the properties of passivity between the inputs and outputs, we present design and validation of a robust lateral nested controller based on passivity, to ensure robust stability and good performances with respect to parametric variations and uncertainties encountered in driving applications. To validate the control strategy, the simulation of the closed-loop system on Matlab-Simulink has been made using the experimental data acquired on the vehicle DYNA of Heudiasyc laboratory (a Peugeot 308), according to several real driving scenarios. The validation shows robustness and good performances of the proposed control approach, and puts in evidence the improvement brought by the Nested PBC controller.