Highly Robust Adaptive Sliding Mode Trajectory Tracking Control of Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous driving technology has not yet been widely adopted, in part due to the challenge of achieving high-accuracy trajectory tracking in complex and hazardous driving scenarios. To this end, we proposed an adaptive sliding mode controller optimized by an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Based on the improved PSO, we also proposed an enhanced grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm to optimize the controller. Taking the expected trajectory and vehicle speed as inputs, the proposed control scheme calculates the tracking error based on an expanded vector field guidance law and obtains the control values, including the vehicle’s orientation angle and velocity on the basis of sliding mode control (SMC). To improve PSO, we proposed a three-stage update function for the inertial weight and a dynamic update law for the learning rates to avoid the local optimum dilemma. For the improvement in GWO, we were inspired by PSO and added speed and memory mechanisms to the GWO algorithm. Using the improved optimization algorithm, the control performance was successfully optimized. Moreover, Lyapunov’s approach is adopted to prove the stability of the proposed control schemes. Finally, the simulation shows that the proposed control scheme is able to provide more precise response, faster convergence, and better robustness in comparison with the other widely used controllers.