Use of Robust DOB/CDOB Compensation to Improve Autonomous Vehicle Path Following Performance in the Presence of Model Uncertainty, CAN Bus Delays and External Disturbances

A path tracking control system is chosen as the proof-of-concept demonstration application in this paper. A disturbance observer (DOB) is embedded within the steering to path error automated driving loop to handle uncertain parameters such as vehicle mass, vehicle velocities and road friction coefficient and to reject yaw moment disturbances. The compensation of vehicle model with the embedded disturbance observer forces it to behave like its nominal model within the bandwidth of the disturbance observer. A parameter space approach based steering controller is then used to optimize performance. The proposed method demonstrates good disturbance rejection and achieves stability robustness. The variable time delay from the steer-by-wire system in an actual vehicle can also lead to stability issues since it adds large negative phase angle to the plant frequency response and tends to destabilize it. A communication disturbance observer (CDOB) based time delay compensation approach that does not require exact knowledge of this time delay is embedded into the steering actuation loop to handle this problem. Stability analysis of both DOB and CDOB compensation system are presented in this paper. Extensive model-in-the-loop simulations were performed to test the designed disturbance observer and CDOB systems and show reduced path following errors in the presence of uncertainty, disturbances and time delay. A validated model of our 2017 Ford Fusion Hybrid research autonomous vehicle is used in the simulation analyses. Simulation results verify the performance enhancement of the vehicle path following control with proposed DOB and CDOB structure. A HiL simulator that uses a validated CarSim model with sensors and traffic will be used later to verify the real time capability of our approach.