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566 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 15, NO. 3, MAY 2007
Predictive Active Steering Control for Autonomous
Vehicle Systems
Paolo Falcone, Francesco Borrelli, Jahan Asgari, Hongtei Eric Tseng, and Davor Hrovat, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—In this paper, a model predictive control (MPC)
approach for controlling an active front steering system in an
autonomous vehicle is presented. At each time step, a trajectory is
assumed to be known over a finite horizon, and an MPC controller
computes the front steering angle in order to follow the trajectory
on slippery roads at the highest possible entry speed. We present
two approaches with different computational complexities. In
the first approach, we formulate the MPC problem by using a
nonlinear vehicle model. The second approach is based on suc-
cessive online linearization of the vehicle model. Discussions on
computational complexity and performance of the two schemes
are presented. The effectiveness of the proposed MPC formulation
is demonstrated by simulation and experimental tests up to 21 m/s
on icy roads.
Index Terms—Active steering, autonomous vehicles, model pre-
dictive control, nonlinear optimization, vehicle dynamics control,
vehicle stability.
I. INTRODUCTION
R
ECENT trends in automotive industry point in the di-
rection of increased content of electronics, computers,
and controls with emphasis on the improved functionality
and overall system robustness. While this affects all of the
vehicle areas, there is a particular interest in active safety,
which effectively complements the passive safety counterpart.
Passive safety is primarily focused on the structural integrity
of vehicle. Active safety on the other hand is primarily used to
avoid accidents and at the same time facilitate better vehicle
controllability and stability especially in emergency situations,
such as what may occur when suddenly encountering slippery
parts of the road [10].
Early works on active safety systems date back to the 1980s
and were primarily focused on improving longitudinal dy-
namics part of motion, in particular, on more effective braking
(ABS) and traction control (TC) systems. ABS systems in-
crease the braking efficiency by avoiding the lock of the braking
wheels. TC systems prevent the wheel from slipping and at the
same time improves vehicle stability and steerability by maxi-
mizing the tractive and lateral forces between the vehicle’s tire
and the road. This was followed by work on different vehicle
Manuscript received November 10, 2006. Manuscript received in final form
January 12, 2007. Recommended by Associate Editor K. Fishbach.
P. Falcone and F. Borrelli are with the Universitá del Sannio, Dipartimento di
Ingegneria, Università degli Studi del Sannio, 82100 Benevento, Italy (e-mail:
falcone@unisannio.it; francesco.borrelli@unisannio.it).
J. Asgari, H. E. Tseng, and D. Hrovat are with Research and Innovation
Center, Ford Research Laboratories, Dearborn, MI 48124 USA (e-mail: jas-
gari@ford.com; htseng@ford.com; dhrovat@ford.com).
Color versions of Figs. 1, 2, and 4–12 are available online at http://ieeexplore.
ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCST.2007.894653
stability control systems [34] (which are also known under
different acronyms such as electronic stability program (ESP),
vehicle stability control (VSC), interactive vehicle dynamics
(IVD), and dynamic stability control (DSC)). Essentially, these
systems use brakes on one side and engine torque to stabilize
the vehicle in extreme limit handling situations through con-
trolling the yaw motion.
In addition to braking and traction systems, active front
steering (AFS) systems make use of the front steering com-
mand in order to improve lateral vehicle stability [1], [2].
Moreover, the steering command can be used to reject ex-
ternal destabilizing forces arising from
-split, asymmetric
braking, or wind [21]. Four-wheel steer (4WS) systems follow
similar goals. For instance, in [3], Ackermann et al. present a
decoupling strategy between the path following and external
disturbances rejection in a four-wheel steering setup. The
automatic car steering is split into the path following and the
yaw stabilization tasks, the first is achieved through the front
steering angle, the latter through the rear steering angle.
Research on the AFS systems has also been approached
from an autonomous vehicle perspective. In [16], an automatic
steering control for highway automation is presented, where
the vehicle is equipped with magnetic sensors placed on the
front and rear bumpers in order to detect a lane reference im-
plemented with electric wire [13] and magnetic markers [36].
A more recent example of AFS applications in autonomous
vehicles is the “Grand Challenge” race driving [5], [23], [30].
In this paper, it is anticipated that the future systems will be
able to increase the effectiveness of active safety interventions
beyond what is currently available. This will be facilitated not
only by additional actuator types such as 4WS, active steering,
active suspensions, or active differentials, but also by additional
sensor information, such as onboard cameras, as well as in-
frared and other sensor alternatives. All these will be further
complemented by global positioning system (GPS) information
including prestored mapping. In this context, it is possible to
imagine that future vehicles would be able to identify obstacles
on the road such as an animal, a rock, or fallen tree/branch, and
assist the driver by following the best possible path, in terms of
avoiding the obstacle and at the same time keeping the vehicle on
the road at a safe distance from incoming traffic. An additional
source of information can also come from surrounding vehicles
and environments which may convey the information from the
vehicle ahead about road condition, which can give a significant
amount of preview to the controller. This is particular is useful
if one travels on snow or ice covered surfaces. In this case, it is
very easy to reach the limit of vehicle handling capabilities.
Anticipating sensor and infrastructure trends toward in-
creased integration of information and control actuation agents,
1063-6536/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE

FALCONE et al.: PREDICTIVE ACTIVE STEERING CONTROL FOR AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE SYSTEMS 567
it is then appropriate to ask what is the optimum way in con-
trolling the vehicle maneuver for a given obstacle avoidance
situation.
We assume that a trajectory planning system is available and
we consider a double lane change scenario on a slippery road,
with a vehicle equipped with a fully autonomous guidance
system. In this paper, we focus on the control of the yaw and
lateral vehicle dynamics via active front steering. The control
input is the front steering angle and the goal is to follow the
desired trajectory or target as close as possible while fulfilling
various constraints reflecting vehicle physical limits and design
requirements. The future desired trajectory is known only over
finite horizon at each time step. This is done in the spirit of
model predictive control (MPC) [14], [26] along the lines of
our ongoing internal research efforts dating from early 2000
(see [7] and references therein).
In this paper, two different formulations of the AFS MPC
problem will be presented and compared. The first one follows
the work presented in [7] and uses a
nonlinear vehicle model
to predict the future evolution of the system [26]. The resulting
MPC controller requires a nonlinear optimization problem to
be solved at each time step. We will show that the computa-
tional burden is currently an obstacle for experimental valida-
tion at high vehicle speed. The second formulation tries to over-
come this problem and presents a suboptimal MPC controller
based on successive online linearization of the nonlinear vehicle
model. This is linearized around the current operating point at
each time step and a linear MPC controller is designed for the re-
sulting linear time-varying (LTV) system. The idea of using time
varying models goes back to the early 1970s in the process con-
trol field although it has been properly formalized only recently.
Studies on linear parameter varying (LPV) MPC schemes can be
found in [9], [18], [20], [22], and [35]. Among them, the work
in [18] and [20] is the closest to our approach and it presents
an MPC scheme for scheduled LTV models which has been
successfully validated on a Boeing aircraft. In general, the per-
formance of such a scheme is highly dependant on the nonlin-
earities of the model. In fact, as the state and input trajectories
deviate from the current operating point, the model mismatch
increases. This can generate large prediction errors with a con-
sequent instability of the closed-loop system. We will show that,
in our application, a state constraint can be introduced in order
to significantly enhance the performance of the system. Exper-
imental results show that the vehicle can be stabilized up to
21 m/s on icy roads. Finally, an LTV MPC with a one-step con-
trol horizon is presented. This can be tuned in order to provide
acceptable performance and it does not require any complex op-
timization software.
We implemented the MPC controllers in real time on a pas-
senger car, and performed tests on snow covered and icy roads.
The last part of this paper describes the experimental setup and
presents the experimental and simulation results of the proposed
MPC controllers. It should be noted that our early work in [7]
focuses on the vehicle dynamical model and on simulation re-
sults of the nonlinear MPC scheme only.
This paper is structured as follows. Section II describes
the used vehicle dynamical model with a brief discussion on
tire models. Section III introduces a simplified hierarchical
Fig. 1. Simplified vehicle “bicycle model.”
framework for autonomous vehicle guidance. The contribution
and the research topic of this paper are described in details
and put in perspective with existing work and future research.
Section IV formulates the control problem when the nonlinear
and the linear prediction models are used. The double lane
change scenario is described in Section V, while in Section VI,
the experimental and simulation results are presented. This is
then followed by concluding remarks in Section VII which
highlight future research directions.
II. M
ODELING
This section describes the vehicle and tire model used for
simulations and control design. This section has been extracted
from [7] and it is included in this paper for the sake of complete-
ness and readability. We denote by
and the longitudinal (or
“tractive”) and lateral (or “cornering”) tire forces, respectively,
and are the forces in car body frame, is the normal tire
load,
is the car inertia, and are the absolute car position
inertial coordinates,
and are the car geometry (distance of
front and rear wheels from center of gravity),
is the gravita-
tional constant,
is the car mass, is the wheel radius, is the
slip ratio,
and are the longitudinal and lateral wheel veloc-
ities,
and are the local lateral and longitudinal coordinates
in car body frame,
is the vehicle speed, is the slip angle,
is the wheel steering angle, is the road friction coefficient,
and
is the heading angle. The lower subscripts and
particularize a variable at the front wheel and the rear wheel,
respectively, e.g.,
is the front wheel longitudinal force.
A. Vehicle Model
A “bicycle model” [25] is used to model the dynamics of the
car under the assumption of a constant tire normal load, i.e.,
,
. Fig. 1 depicts a diagram of the vehicle model,
which has the following longitudinal, lateral, and turning or yaw
degrees of freedom:
(1a)
(1b)
(1c)
The vehicle’s equations of motion in an absolute inertial
frame are
(2)

568 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 15, NO. 3, MAY 2007
The wheel’s equations of motion describe the lateral (or cor-
nering) and longitudinal wheel velocities
(3a)
(3b)
(3c)
(3d)
where
and are front and rear wheel steering angle, respec-
tively, and
(4a)
(4b)
The following equations hold for rear and front axes by using
the corresponding subscript for all the variables. Longitudinal
and lateral tire forces lead to the following forces acting on the
center of gravity:
(5a)
Tire forces
and for each tire are given by
(6)
where
, , , and are defined next. The tire slip angle
represents the angle between the wheel velocity vector and
the direction of the wheel itself, and can be compactly expressed
as
(7)
The slip ratio
is defined as
if for braking
if for driving
(8)
where
and are the radius and the angular speed of the wheel,
respectively. The parameter
represents the road friction coef-
ficient and is assumed equal for front and rear wheels.
is the
total vertical load of the vehicle and is distributed between the
front and rear wheels based on the geometry of the car model
(described by the parameters
and )
(9)
The nonlinear vehicle dynamics described in (1)–(9), can be
rewritten in the following compact from:
(10)
where the dependence on slip ratio
and friction coefficient
value
at each time instant has been explicitly highlighted. The
state and input vectors are
and ,
respectively. In this paper,
is assumed to be zero at any time
instant.
Model (10) captures the most relevant nonlinearities associ-
ated to lateral stabilization of the vehicle. Section II-B briefly
describes the models of tire forces
and .
Fig. 2. Longitudinal and lateral tire forces with different
coefficient values.
B. Tire Model
With the exception of aerodynamic forces and gravity, all of
the forces which affect vehicle handling are produced by the
tires. Tire forces provide the primary external influence and, be-
cause of their highly nonlinear behavior, cause the largest vari-
ation in vehicle handling properties throughout the longitudinal
and lateral maneuvering range. Therefore, it is important to use
a realistic nonlinear tire model, especially when investigating
large control inputs that result in response near the limits of the
maneuvering capability of the vehicle. In such situations, the
lateral and longitudinal motions of the vehicle are strongly cou-
pled through the tire forces, and large values of slip ratio and
slip angle can occur simultaneously.
Most of the existing tire models are predominantly “semi-em-
pirical” in nature. That is, the tire model structure is determined
through analytical considerations, and key parameters depend
on tire data measurements. Those models range from extremely
simple (where lateral forces are computed as a function of slip
angle, based on one measured slope at
and one measured
value of the maximum lateral force) to relatively complex al-
gorithms, which use tire data measured at many different loads
and slip angles.
In this paper, we use a Pacejka tire model [4] to describe the
tire longitudinal and cornering forces in (6). This is a complex,
semi-empirical nonlinear model that takes into consideration
the interaction between the longitudinal force and the cornering
force in combined braking and steering. The longitudinal and
cornering forces are assumed to depend on the normal force, slip
angle, surface friction coefficient, and longitudinal slip. Fig. 2
depicts longitudinal and lateral forces versus longitudinal slip
and slip angle, for fixed values of the friction coefficients. We
remark that the front tire of the “bicycle” model represents the
two front tires of the actual car.
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