The road to autonomous vehicles is a long one and we are yet to reach the finishing line. However, there are many companies as well as governments that have been making progress towards a driverless future. It includes a researcher’s team that recently came up with a novel strategy for autonomous ground vehicle path tracking system. Al existing algorithms that are used for path tracking mostly treat AGVs as a non-flexible point which leads them to describe the path either as a continuous curve or a series of discrete points. The main issue with this approach is that it keeps out factors like AGV shape and width of the road the vehicle is riding on. This then leads to collisions or straying of AGVs away from the roads.
The research team further goes on to explain that the AGV path tracking includes two major problems: control of velocity and control of steering. In order to address these issues related with AGV shape and the width of road, the team focused all their attention on steering control problem related with path tracking and adopting the vehicle’s velocity as a constant. The new steering control method that is in place takes the vehicle’s shape to be rectangle against the approach that takes in a single point. It also considers the road width which is actually a boundary constraint. The researchers combined this model with a Model Predictive Control (MPC) in an effort to sort out the path tracking problem.
The team examined their new approach with the Hongqi HQ430 which is an AGV embedded with driving control and environmental perception system. As per these researchers, the experiments showcased the influence of this new method related to path tracking to the HW430 since the vehicle selected to follow a square path. This new method solves out one part of the puzzle related with self-driving, it is definitely mandatory for researchers to keep improving the technologies so that widespread adoption of driverless vehicles is not a problem.
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