Safety Guarantees for Lanekeeping Assistance Systems With Time-Varying Disturbances: A Lyapunov Approach

Active lanekeeping assistance systems have the potential of saving thousands of lives every year. These systems must provide some level of increased safety while working cooperatively with the driver. Our approach passively couples the vehicle to the environment using the paradigm of ‘artificial’ potential fields. Since this control scheme does not attempt to track a desired trajectory, disturbances encountered during normal driving (such as road curvature) will alter the path of the vehicle. In order to ensure nominal safety of this system, a Lyapunov based bound is developed that handles general time-varying disturbances. This technique provides excellent bounds on the lateral motion of the vehicle. Experimental results verify that this bound works extremely well in practice.