Abstract
The application of adaptive control techniques in the development of control systems for intelligent vehicles, especially for ground vehicle path-following controllers, has gained popularity due to their ability to handle large-scale parametric uncertainties. However, the use of a standard quadratic Lyapunov function in existing adaptive control-based path-following controllers can lead to poor transient performance, such as slow convergence and/or large overshoot. To address this limitation, this study proposes the use of a switching non-quadratic Lyapunov function to design a model reference adaptive path-following controller that aims to provide superior transient performance. The stability and signal convergence of the closed-loop system are demonstrated through a Lyapunov-like analysis. Through dSPACE ASM simulation, the effectiveness of the proposed controller is illustrated, which confirms improved tracking performance over a baseline solution.