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Autonomous vehicle motion control development requires testing and evaluation at all stages of the process. The development phase involving the instrumentation and operation of a full-size vehicle can be especially costly. Scale vehicles have been developed in the literature to serve as a cost-effective transition from testing in a simulation environment to a physical system. However, the existing scale vehicle platforms do not support four-wheel steering and cannot isolate the performance of motion control algorithms from other modules such as perception and path planning. This letter closes this gap by proposing a new scale vehicle platform, called JetRacer-4WS, based on the open-source JetRacer autonomous vehicle with additional modifications to support four-wheel steering, model predictive control-based path following, and high-precision ultrasonic-based real-time positioning. The proposed JetRacer-4WS can be used as a low-cost platform for both research and education on motion control, path following, and vehicle dynamics. We describe the design of JetRacer-4WS, and experimentally demonstrate JetRacer-4WS' ability to perform controller auto-tuning and illustrate the advantage of four-wheel steering. We also show that JetRacer-4WS can be used as a validation platform for testing advanced control algorithms such as event-triggered model predictive control.
Rother et al. (Tue,) studied this question.