Adarsh1 Siddharth Singh1 A. V. S. Sai Bhargav Kumar2 Sriram N. N.2 K. Madhava Krishna2
1 Univeristy of Pennsylvania 2 IIIT Hyderabad, India
In this paper, we present a novel control law for longitudinal speed control of autonomous vehicles. The key contributions of the proposed work include the design of a control law that reactively integrates the longitudinal surface gradient of the road into itsoperation. In contrast to the existing works, we found that integrating the path gradient into the control framework improves the speed tracking efficacy. Since the control law is implemented over a shrinking domain scheme, it minimizes the integrated error by recomputing the control inputs at every discretized step and consequently provides less reaction time. This makes our control law suitable for motion planning frameworks that are operating at high frequencies. Furthermore, our work is implemented using a generalized vehicle model and can be easily extended to other classes of vehicles. The performance of gradient aware - shrinking domain based controller is implemented and tested on an electric car. Results from the tests show the robustness of our control law for speed tracking efficiency on terrain with varying gradient while also considering stringent time constraints imposed by the planning framework.