A study of a comfortable vehicle motion predictive control with no speed limit reference

In the last decade great advances have been achieved in the development of reliable Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. The feeling of safety in automated vehicles performing trajectory tracking in urban environments has become an interesting field of study, where several strategies have been proposed. However, most of the current approaches employ speed limiters for the longitudinal control of automated vehicles to avoid discomfort due to excessive lateral accelerations in paths with high curvatures. Therefore, smoothness of the path must be evaluated previously in a planning stage before the trajectory tracking task. In this work, a comparative study is carried out with different comfortable predictive controllers based on kinematic model approaches. Moreover, the novelty of including the lateral acceleration as an additional state parameter into the tracking stage to avoid a previous speed limit calculation is evaluated. A comparison of the strategies is accomplished using a simulated test vehicle within a realistic environment developed in Dynacar. For that purpose, the control architecture for the automated driving problem is exhaustively explained and low-level control disturbances are considered and modeled to scale into a future real implementation of the vehicle motion control strategies. The performed tests demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed approach.