Design of a robust high-performance fuzzy path tracker for autonomous vehicles

Abstract

This paper deals with automatic steering of autonomous wheeled mobile robots by using fuzzy logic. The fuzzy controller has as inputs the vehicle's relative position and orientation with respect to the path to follow, and the controller's output is the steering angle. The dynamic behaviour of path tracking with fuzzy controllers is investigated. The problem is not easy, owing to the nonlinear nature of the feedback tracking system. A new method for designing and tuning fuzzy path trackers for autonomous vehicles is proposed. The results of the application of the designed fuzzy path tracking controllers to RAMA, a mobile robot designed and built for navigation in indoor and outdoor industrial environments, are shown. The experiments demonstrate a very stable and precise path tracking.