Experimental Validation of a Kinematic Bicycle Model Predictive Control with Lateral Acceleration Consideration

Nowadays, Automated Driving has a growing interest in the scientific and industrial automotive community. The vehicle motion planning is an essential procedure to obtain safe and comfortable trajectories, adapting the longitudinal speed to the road legal limits and mainly to avoid the excessive lateral accelerations along the journey. Typically, the proper speed of the vehicle is intrinsically related to the curvature of the path, requiring a previous approximation of this parameter in the planning stage. In this work, a novel procedure to follow a route trajectory and speed limits considering the lateral acceleration parameter is presented. A lateral jerk equation was developed and introduced into a kinematic bicycle model predictive control formulation. An adaptive speed weight equation that depends on the lateral acceleration is presented to improve the lateral positioning. A vehicle motion control simulation, developed in Dynacar, is validated with some real tests. The results show the capabilities of the proposed approach. An accurate vehicle motion control considers the lateral acceleration to avoid unfeasibility in optimization problem.