Control and Validation of Automated Lane Centering and Lane Changing Maneuver

This paper describes an automated lane changing control system that has been developed at General Motors Research and Development. This system uses a single monochrome camera to recognize lane markings on the road ahead and uses multiple short range radars to detect surrounding traffic and objects. A sensing unit calculates the host vehicle’s lateral displacement and the heading angle from the center of its lane as well as the relative distance and relative speed of each object. Since the smoothness and comfort of lane change maneuvering are important measures of the control performance, the vehicle dynamic model is integrated into the desired path generation and vehicle’s controller design to reduce the vehicle lateral acceleration and the lateral offset overshoot during the lane change maneuvering. To avoid heavy computation, a simplified model predictive control algorithm is proposed. The control algorithm calculates a steering angle command at the current time step to drive the vehicle to the desired path. The control method and algorithms are implemented on a demonstration vehicle and validated at straight roads and various curve roads of up to 0.001 1/m curvature for different vehicle speeds up to 100 km/hr. The results show that lane change maneuvering is successfully completed with lateral offset error less than 20 cm.