High-precision motion control method and practice for autonomous driving in complex off-road environments

In the last decade, autonomous driving technology has become an important research topic due to its potential economic and social benefits. There has been considerable research activities contributed to make the autonomous driving system adapt to complex environments. Motion control is vital to the overall autonomous driving system, especially when the autonomous vehicle is driving in complex off-road environments. The aim of our work in this paper is to develop a high-precision motion controller for autonomous driving system running on rugged mountain roads and sand roads. Different from most existing methods in which the motion control problem is decoupled into lateral control and longitudinal control. In this work, a coupling controller is designed for solving the motion control problem of autonomous driving system. Experiments in the real-world rugged mountain road and sand road environment have been conducted to demonstrate the high-precision performance and efficiency of the proposed motion controller.