Model Predictive Control for Autonomous Driving considering Actuator Dynamics

In this paper, we propose a new model predictive control (MPC) formulation for autonomous driving. The novelty of our formulation stems from the following new results. Firstly, we adopt an alternating minimization approach wherein linear velocities and angular accelerations are alternately optimized. We show that in contrast to the joint formulation, the alternating minimization better exploits the structure of the problem. This in turn translates to reduction in computation time. Secondly, our MPC formulation incorporates the time dependent non-linear actuator dynamics which relates commanded velocity input to the actual body velocity of the vehicle. This added complexity improves the predictive component of MPC resulting in improved margin of inter-vehicle distance during maneuvers like overtaking, lane-change etc. Although, past works have also incorporated actuator dynamics within MPC, there has been very few attempts towards coupling actuator dynamics to collision avoidance constraints through the non-holonomic motion model of the vehicle and analyzing the resulting behavior. We test our formulation on a simulated environment and use metrics like inter-vehicle distance, velocity overshoot to demonstrate its usefulness.