Copyright © 2010 Yi Fu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Autonomous road following is one of the major goals in intelligent vehicle applications. The development of an autonomous road following embedded system for intelligent vehicles is the focus of this paper. A fuzzy logic controller (FLC) is designed for vision-based autonomous road following. The stability analysis of this control system is addressed. Lyapunov's direct method is utilized to formulate a class of control laws that guarantee the convergence of the steering error. Certain requirements for the control laws are presented for designers to choose a suitable rule base for the fuzzy controller in order to make the system stable. Stability of the proposed fuzzy controller is guaranteed theoretically and also demonstrated by simulation studies and experiments. Simulations using the model of the four degree of freedom nonholonomic robotic vehicle are conducted to investigate the performance of the fuzzy controller. The proposed fuzzy controller can achieve the desired steering angle and make the robotic vehicle follow the road successfully. Experiments show that the developed intelligent vehicle is able to follow a mocked road autonomously.