Robust Funnel Control for Vehicle Lateral Tracking Without Road Curvature Information

ABSTRACT This article addresses the challenge of autonomous vehicle control on curved roads by developing a funnel‐based control framework, in which vehicle motion is decomposed into longitudinal and lateral subsystems using the Frenet frame. A funnel‐based lateral controller is designed to constrain the lateral tracking error within prescribed time‐varying boundaries. In contrast to curvature‐dependent control approaches, the proposed lateral controller does not require explicit road curvature information and handles the relative‐degree‐two lateral error dynamics using a low‐complexity funnel control scheme. The proposed framework thus extends funnel cruise control from straight‐road scenarios to curved‐road environments. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated through numerical simulations in MATLAB and high‐fidelity simulations in CARLA. The results demonstrate robust path‐tracking and inter‐vehicle spacing regulation performance.