Planning and Tracking Control of Full Drive-by-Wire Electric Vehicles in Unstructured Scenario

Full drive-by-wire electric vehicles (FDWEV) with X-by-wire technology can achieve independent driving, braking, and steering of each wheel, providing a good application platform for autonomous driving technology. Path planning and tracking control, in particular, are critical components of autonomous driving. However, It is challenging to comprehensively design an robust control algorithm by integrating vehicle path planning in a complicated unstructured scenario for FDWEV. To address the above issue, this paper first proposes the artificial potential field (APF) method for path planning in the prescribed park with different static obstacles to generate the reference path information, where speed planning is incorporated considering kinematics and dynamic constraints. Second, two tracking control methods, curvature calculation (CC-based) and model predictive control (MPC-based) methods with the lateral dynamics model, are proposed to track the desired path under different driving conditions, in which a forward-looking behavior model of the driver with variable preview distance is designed based on fuzzy control theory. CarSim-AMESim-Simulink co-simulation is conducted with the existence of obstacles. The simulation results show that the proposed two control approaches are effective for many driving scenarios and the MPC-based path-tracking controller enhances dynamic tracking performance and ensures good maneuverability under high-dynamic driving conditions.