Curvature Sensitive Modification of Pure Pursuit Control1

Abstract

Pure pursuit control is a commonly used method in the vehicle path-tracking problem. While widely used, it has some limitations, including the fact that its accuracy is very sensitive to the lookahead distance. A variety of different modifications to pure pursuit have been developed in an attempt to deal with this, and in this paper, an additional modification is proposed that combines speed and understeer gradient sensitivity with a curvature-based gain compensation based on target points on the path. Results are compared to the standard pure pursuit controller, demonstrating the improvements from this modification.