MPC-Based Cooperative Control Strategy of Path Planning and Trajectory Tracking for Intelligent Vehicles

In this paper, we propose a progressive model predictive control scheme (PMPCS) by considering the cooperative control of local planning and path tracking for intelligent vehicles. An improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) based model predictive control (MPC) method is developed to solve the planning and tracking problem. With the PMPCS, the total computational burden can be reduced sharply because of the seamless connection and mutual promotion between the optimization of two layers. Besides we also propose a novel planning algorithm, which can take traffic lights and overtaking time constraint into account. To solve these problems, we first combine model predictive control with artificial potential field (APF) to get a collision-free path by treating the time-varying safety constraints as the scope of the repulsive force and an asymmetrical lane potential field function. Furthermore, the pseudo velocity planning method is adopted to take traffic lights into account in the planning module. Simulation results show the reliability of the proposed algorithm and the advantages of the scheme compared with general hierarchical algorithm.