A Comparative Study of Vision-Based Lateral Control Strategies for Autonomous Highway Driving

Abstract

With the increasing speeds of modern microprocessors, it has become ever more common for computer-vision algorithms to find application in real-time control tasks. In this paper, we present an analysis of the problem of steering an autonomous vehicle along a highway based on the images obtained from a CCD camera mounted in the vehicle. We explore the effects of changing various important system parameters like the vehicle velocity, the look-ahead range of the vision sensor, and the processing delay associated with the perception and control systems.

We also present the results of a series of experiments that were designed to provide a systematic comparison of a number of control strategies. The control strategies that were explored include a lead-lag control law, a full-state linear controller, and an input-output linearizing control law. Each of these control strategies was implemented and tested at highway speeds on our experimental vehicle platform, a Honda Accord LX sedan.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bertozzi, Massimo, and Broggi, Alberto. 1997. Vision-based vehicle guidance . Computer 30(7): 49-49 .

Dickmanns, Ernst D., and Mysliwetz, Birger D. 1992. Recursive 3-D road and relative ego-state recognition . IEEE Trans. Patt. Analysis Machine Intell. 14(2): 199–213 .

Epiau, B., Chaumette, F., and Rives, P. 1992. A new approach to visual servoing . IEEE Trans. Robot. Automat. 8(3): 313–326 .

Faugeras, Oliver. 1993. Three-Dimensional Computer Vision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .

Gelb, Arthur. 1974. Applied Optimal Estimation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .

Guldner, J., Tan, H.-S., and Patwarddhan, S. 1996. Analysis of automated steering control for highway vehicles with look-down lateral reference systems . Vehicle Sys. Dyn. 26(4): 243–269 .

Hess, R. A. 1990. A control theoretic model of driver steering behavior . IEEE Control Sys. Mag. 10(5): 3–8 .

Herman, Martin, Nashman, Marilyn, Hong, Tsai-Hong, Schneiderman, Henry, Coombs, David, Young, Gin-Shu, Raviv, Daniel, and Wavering, Albert J. 1997. Minimalist vision for navigation. In Aloimonos, Y. (ed.) Visual Navigation, from Bological Systems to Unmanned Ground Vehicles. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc .

Isidori, Alberto. 1989. Nonlinear Control Systems. Springer-Verlag .

10.

Land, M. F. 1996. The time it takes to process visual information when steering a vehicle . Investigative Ophthalmology. 37(Suppl.): 525-525 .

11.

Land, M., and Horwood, J. 1995. Which parts of the road guide steering . Nature 377(28).

12.

Land, M. F., and Lee, D. N. 1994. Where do we look when we steer? Nature 369(30).

13.

Özgüner, Ü., Ünyelioglu, K. A., and Hatipoglu, C. 1995. An analytical study of vehicle steering control. Proc. of the 4th IEEE Conf. on Control Appl. Washington, DC: IEEE , pp. 125–130.

14.

Özgüner, Ü., Ünyelioglu, K. A., and Hatipoglu, C. 1997. Steering and lane change: A working system. Proc. of the IEEE Conf. on Intell. Transportation Sys. Washington, DC: IEEE .

15.

Peng, H. 1992. Vehicle lateral control for highway automation. PhD thesis, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Univeristy of California, Berkeley.

16.

Pomerlaeau, Dean. 1995. RALPH: Rapidly adapting lateral position handler. Proc. of Intell. Vehicles 1995, pp. 54–59.

17.

Raviv, D., and Herman, M. 1991. A non reconstruction approach for road following . SPIE Proc. on Intell. Robots and Comp. Vision 1608: 2–12 .

18.

Thorpe, Chuck E., Hebert, Martial, Kanade, Takeo, and Shafer, Steve. 1988. Vision and navigation for the Carnegie-mellon Navlab . IEEE Trans. Patt. Analysis Machine Intell. 10(3): 362–373 .