Analysis and Experimental Evaluation of a Lateral Controller for Path Tracking of Mobile Systems

This paper presents a novel lateral controller that solves the path tracking problem. The proposed controller uses an orthogonal projection on a prescribed path to stabilise an error model, which leads to constructive conditions on the controller parameters. Explicit formulas to determine the orthogonal projection for straight and circular paths are given and it will be shown that the mobile system stays on an appropriately designed path once it reaches the path. The theoretical results are verified by laboratory experiments.