Path tracking with personalized handling stability constraints matched to driving styles

Abstract

In the path-tracking control process, drivers have different expectations of the lateral response of vehicles. To meet drivers’ expectations of handling stability, this paper proposes a model predictive control (MPC)-based path-tracking controller with personalized handling stability constraints matched to driving style. Firstly, the categories of driving styles are obtained by applying the K-Means algorithm to the collected driving data. Then the sideslip angle-longitudinal velocity map is constructed based on the nonlinear dynamics model of the vehicle to generate the front-wheel steering angle constraints that are matched with the maximum sideslip of the vehicle expected by drivers of different styles. After that, an MPC-based path-tracking controller has been built, and the front-wheel steering angle is incorporated into the MPC controller. Furthermore, compared to the strategy of directly using sideslip angle constraints for handling stability control, this approach avoids introducing additional constraint variables, leading to improved real-time performance. Simulation experiments are conducted to compare the dynamic vehicle responses between the handling stability control that takes into account the driving style and the control system that does not consider the driving style. In addition, the subjective evaluation is conducted to verify the proposed path-tracking control method that considers the stability constraints of driving style. The evaluation results show that the proposed method can obtain better subjective evaluation results than a path-tracking controller that does not consider the driving style. Finally, through the hardware-in-the-loop experiments, the real-time computational capability of the proposed controller is verified.