Integration of auto-steering with adaptive cruise control for improved cornering behaviour

Several works have proposed longitudinal control strategies enabling a vehicle to operate adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance functions. However, no integration with lateral control has been proposed in the current state of the art, which motivates the developments of this work. This study presents an integrated control strategy for adaptive cruise control with auto-steering for highway driving. An appropriate logic-based control strategy is used to create synergies and safe interaction between longitudinal and lateral controllers to obtain both lateral stability and advanced adaptive cruise control functionalities. In particular, an index is proposed to evaluate lateral motion of the vehicle based on previously published experimental studies on human driving. In order to handle unstable lateral motion of the vehicle, the desired acceleration is determined based on physical limitation in braking with cornering situations. Simulation results show that the proposed integrated controller satisfies the performance in terms of autonomous driving, path tracking and collision avoidance for various driving situations.