Boundary Tracking Control for Autonomous Vehicles with Rigidly Mounted Range Sensors

Abstract

In this paper, we present control laws for an autonomous vehicle with rigidly mounted range sensors to track a boundary curve. In particular, we consider a vehicle that has a group of rays close to one center ray that has an arbitrary fixed angle to the heading of the vehicle. To achieve robust tracking performance in noisy environments, we present sliding mode based controllers. Also, switching control laws are developed to avoid singularities in control laws. Rigorous proof and extensive simulation results verify the validity and robustness of our control laws.