Analysis and design for semi-automatic and automatic control of vehicles by permanent magnets

The analysis and design carried out in this study relates to automatic or semi-automatic lateral control of a vehicle. This is one of the three essential subsystems needed for a complete automatic control system. The other two subsystems provide longitudinal control, and intersection or lane-changing control. The system studied employs a series of permanent magnets which have been embedded vertically in the road and spaced at an interval to be used for position reference, leading to discontinuous error signal. This system has been analyzed by classical Z-transform analysis and control models have been developed for two kinds of controls. First, a \u27Semi-Automatic Control\u27 which includes the driver in the control loop. Second, a fully ‘Automatic Control\u27 was developed to replace the driver and, at the same time, give better results. The results of the research indicated that the Semi- Automatic system was stable for a magnet spacing of 12 feet. The system became unstable for the magnet spacing of more than 12 feet. In the fully Automatic Control system, where the driver was replaced by a compensator, performance of the system was very much improved and a system which is stable for magnet spacings up to 20 feet was obtained. A CSMP Simulation indicated that there were no inter-sample ripples --Abstract, pages ii-iii