Integrating vehicle positioning and path tracking practices for an autonomous vehicle prototype in campus environment

This paper presents the implementation of an autonomous electric vehicle (EV) project in the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST) campus in Taiwan. The aim of this work was to integrate two important practices of realizing an autonomous vehicle in a campus environment, including vehicle positioning and path tracking. Such a project is helpful to the students to learn and practice key technologies of autonomous vehicles conveniently. Therefore, a laboratory-made EV was equipped with real-time kinematic GPS (RTK-GPS) to provide centimeter position accuracy. Furthermore, the model predictive control (MPC) was proposed to perform the path tracking capability. Nevertheless, the RTK-GPS exhibited some robust positioning concerns in practical application, such as a low update rate, signal obstruction, signal drift, and network instability. To solve this problem, a multisensory fusion approach using an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) was utilized to improve the vehicle positioning performance by further considering an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and wheel odometry. On the other hand, the model predictive control (MPC) is usually used to control autonomous EVs. However, the determination of MPC parameters is a challenging task. Hence, reinforcement learning (RL) was utilized to generalize the pre-trained datum value for the determination of MPC parameters in practice. To evaluate the performance of the RL-based MPC, software simulations using MATLAB and a laboratory-made, full-scale electric vehicle were arranged for experiments and validation. In a 199.27 m campus loop path, the estimated travel distance error was 0.82% in terms of UKF. The MPC parameters generated by RL also achieved a better tracking performance with 0.227 m RMSE in path tracking experiments, and they also achieved a better tracking performance when compared to that of human-tuned MPC parameters.