AN AUTOMATED DRIVER BASED ON CONVERGENT VECTOR FIELDS

This paper provides insight into the nature of the driving task and offers a new approach for lateral and longitudinal control as well as advanced cruise control systems. The driving task is divided into two subtasks: path planning and local feedback control. A geometric approach is used, involving a vector field analysis. It is shown that feedback control can be used in guaranteeing stable asymptotic tracking of a reference path, even under limited handling conditions.