The paper presents a new internal model control (IMC) based control technique for
lateral trajectory tracking of autonomous vehicles. The controller’s proposed structure
employs a robust, fault-tolerant nonlinear internal servo control with optimal reference
generation concerning vehicle yaw stability and physical limitations. The presented
inscription of the reference generation creates a convex optimization task that can
be used in real-time applications. Improvements in yaw-rate stability of vehicle motion
control are first shown through simulation results performed in a Simulink environment.
The controller structure was also implemented in a real-time model and was examined
in a Mercedes C-Class vehicle. In this article, the simulation results and the real-time
measurements are presented. The results show that the proposed controller has high
efficiency in disturbance rejection and lower sensitivity towards parameter changes
compared to a model predictive control (MPC) structure.