Comparative Study of MPC and PID Controllers in Autonomous Vehicle Application

The main challenging task in autonomous navigation is path-following control where the vehicle required to track a given path. Which can be interpreted by the error between the reference path and the desired one is to converge to zero and it gets more complicated when the vehicle dynamics is considered, such as non-linear vehicle dynamics, fast sampling time and limited computing resources. In this paper, we compare and describe the performance of the control law based on PID and MPC controllers for vehicle path tracking. PID controller is used for controlling the speed, stability and precision of the response, and eliminating the static error. MPC controller is used because of its known advantages such as the explicit handling of constraints explicit use of a model, well understood and defined tuning parameters and the most interesting advantage is the ability to predict future behavior of the system and take it into consideration.