This chapter is dedicated to studying the characteristics of the optimal preview control for lateral steering of a passenger vehicle. Such control is known to guarantee improved performance when the near future of the exogenous signal, here the road curvature, is known. The synthesis is performed in continuous time and leads to a two-degrees of freedom feedback and feedforward controller, whose feedforward part is a finite impulse response filter. The controller has been implemented on the SCANeRTM Driving Simulator available at IRCCyN, whose steering column is electrically powered. A methodology for choosing the weighting matrices in the quadratic index and the preview time are finally proposed. The obtained experimental results are discussed as well.
Optimal Control with Preview for Lateral Steering of a Passenger Car: design and test on a driving simulator