On adaptive fuzzy control for combined longitudinal and lateral vehicular control

The main quest in this work is to develop a novel combined longitudinal and lateral controller that reliably attends the needs of precise motion control of highway vehicles. In pursuit of this a novel hybrid controller setup consisting of a PD (proportional-derivative) controller and an adaptive fuzzy controller is developed. The PD function is to do the main tracking in the domains of longitudinal and lateral control while the adaptive fuzzy controller is to address the coupling effects, nonlinearity issues and model uncertainties with further refining the output results. A three degrees-of-freedom (DOF) nonlinear vehicle model is used for the development and testing purposes of the controller. The controller is tested for viability in rigorous simulated scenarios subjected to some extreme parametric limitations. The results obtained from these tests proved the effectiveness of the controller that has been developed.