California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This report presents design and experimental evaluation of lateral controllers for commuter buses based on Sliding Mode Control (SMC). The objective of the control is to track the lane centerline. SMC, a robust control technique, is selected as a nonlinear control strategy to take care of variation in longitudinal velocity. Two SMC based controllers are designed and are shown to differ only in the position of an integrator which gets naturally introduced into the closed loop. One of the methods is chosen for experimental verification because it guarantees asymptotic tracking with no chatter in the control input to the steering actuator of the vehicle.