Design and testing of a novel intervention configuration for the lane keeping system for vehicles

This study presents a novel intervention configuration for lane keeping assistance system. The goal of the new configuration is to increase the robustness of the lateral control of the vehicle by utilizing the force potential of three wheels by applying braking torque to one of the rear wheels in coordination with a steering angle input to the front axle. An LQR (Linear-Quadratic Regulator) controller is designed using a single-track vehicle model and then tested in a simulation environment using Simulink and CarMaker software. In order to observe the performance of the system, three test cases were designed in which yaw rate, yaw angle, and lateral error were used as test inputs. The performance of the proposed intervention configuration was compared with only steering and only braking configurations. Test results show that the coordinated steering and brake control configuration provided the best performance with the lowest control input compared to the other two configurations. The new intervention configuration improved the response speed of the lane keeping considerably. The predictive model controller (MPC) was designed to improve the configuration's performance and compared with the LQR performance with the clothoid ramp experiment. The new configuration with MPC has succeeded in displaying high-level performance.