Controller design for vehicle heading control

Abstract

Unmanned ground vehicles have significant role to play in the fields of military, space exploration, accessing dangerous terrain, operating in hazardous industries and process stations. Control of the heading of the vehicle is critical to its safety and stability. Modelling the parameters and process is critical to developing a control strategy for it. There are multiple factors that are responsible for the heading of the vehicle which can lead to a complicated process model. However, the model has been simplified by suitable approximations. The objective of this research is to control the heading of a vehicle in the real world environment under the unpredictable and unstructured surroundings. The change of heading direction and the speed of the vehicle influence to the motion of a vehicle. The vehicle model that was assumed was a four wheeled electric motor driven car, whose steering system is modified to be controlled by a DC servo motor mounted at the steering wheel shaft, and is fitted with a compass sensor to measure the current heading direction of the vehicle. Various control strategies were simulated in Simulink to converge at the most appropriate one. The chief objective was to achieve minimum settling time and also reduce overshoot and steady state error. Strategies such as double loop controller, Internal Model Controller (IMC), Modified IMC and robust controller are used for the same process and the performance of each is presented.