Path Following for Autonomous Electric Vehicles

 

Objectives:

 

Electric vehicles are expected to be a common choice of personal transportation within a near future. The electric driving is a convenient setting for designing controllers that allow autonomous navigation. Path following is a methodology for driving the vehicle along a path without temporal constraints, meaning that the forward velocity can be chosen within safety limits.

 

Despite being a well-known research and development subject, path following is still challenging when significant uncertainties are found in the system model or in the positioning sensor-measurements. Uncertainties may imply large deviations of the vehicle pose with respect to the desired paths.

 

The main objectives/steps of the work are the following:

 

- Create simulation setup based on the real setup where sample (existing) controllers can be tested. Simple models as the unicycle are considered in a first stage.

- Improve system model by considering the car motion model.

- Consider experiments where the position sensors can have malfunction periods or have added noise.

 

This work is conducted within the framework of the project VIENA, driving a FIAT electric car, representing the IST. Some information regarding the VIENA project can be found in

https://istpowerlab.wixsite.com/e2tes/viena

 

 

Requirements (grades, required courses, etc):

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Localization:

IST Alameda

 

Observations:

 

Previous works provide good starting points for the thesis.

 

For more information contact José Gaspar

http://www.isr.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/~jag