Minimum-Time Path Following in Highly Redundant Electric Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles are becoming a reality that in the next future will most probably start populating everyday roads. Such vehicles can, on the one hand, increase safety through automated driving, and, on the other, be a means of transportation also for people with disabilities who cannot move alone on commercial cars. Within this class of vehicles, mechanical layouts that allow an actuator redundancy coupled with electric propulsion appear particularly interesting, as they make it possible to design motion controller that can optimally blend multiple objectives, both dynamic, safety and driver-oriented. This paper considers such setting and concentrates on the design of a path-following algorithm with minimum-time features, with the aim of combining performance and energy-oriented optimization of the vehicle motion. The effectiveness of the approach is assessed by means of simulation tests carried out on the CarSim vehicle simulation environment.