Path tracking control of automated vehicles based on adaptive MPC in variable scenarios

For complex and dynamic high-speed driving scenarios, an adaptive model predictive control (MPC) controller is designed to ensure effective path tracking for automated vehicles. Firstly, in order to prevent model mismatch in the MPC controller, a tire cornering stiffness estimation algorithm is designed and a soft constraint on slip angle is added to further enhance the controller's precision in tracking trajectories and the vehicle's driving stability. Secondly, the improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) method with dynamic weights and penalty functions is suggested to address the issue of insufficient accuracy in solving quadratic programming. Additionally, the standard particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to seek the most suitable time horizon parameters offline to obtain the best time horizon data set under different vehicle speeds and adhesion coefficients, and then it is optimized online by an adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) to enhance the model predictive controller's adaptability in different operating conditions. Finally, simulation experiments are conducted under three different operating conditions: docked roads, split roads, and variable vehicle speeds. The results indicate that the designed adaptive MPC controller can accurately and stably track the reference trajectory in various scenarios.