Cascade architecture for lateral control in autonomous vehicles

Research on intelligent transport systems (ITSs) is steadily leading to safer and more comfortable control for vehicles. Systems that permit longitudinal control have already been implemented in commercial vehicles, acting on throttle and brake. Nevertheless, lateral control applications are less common in the market. Since a too-sudden turn of the steering wheel can cause an accident in a few seconds, good speed and position control of the steering wheel is essential. We present here a new cascade control architecture based on fuzzy logic controllers that emulate a human driver's behavior. The control architecture was tested on a real vehicle at different vehicle speeds. The results showed the use of a straightforward and intuitive fuzzy controller to give good performance.