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To properly respond to demands to reduce national energy consumption and meet greenhouse gas emission targets based on environment policy, the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy of Korea formed a research consortium consisting of government agencies and academic and research institutions to establish the first fuel efficiency standards for medium- and heavy-duty (MHD) commercial vehicles. The standards are expected to be introduced in 2017 as Phase 1 of the plan and will regulate trucks with a gross vehicle weight in excess of 3.5 tons and buses with a carrying capacity of more than 16 persons. Most MHD commercial vehicles are custom-made and manufactured in diversified small-quantity batch production systems for commercial or public use, resulting in difficulties in utilizing mandatory vehicle tests for fuel efficiency evaluations.

This paper describes a lateral control of autonomous large size buses on road with large curvature. In the case of long and wide commercial vehicle such as large bus, applying centerline tracking controllers in constrained environments such as large curved road (e.g. turning at intersection) may cause some concerns. Two concerns are considered: inner lane crossing related to collisions with curb and opposite lane crossing related to threatening surrounding vehicles. Considering relations between width and curvature of the road and length and width of the large size bus, the curvature of road at which inner or outer lane crossing begin to occur was calculated when centerline tracking controller was applied. Thus, the proposed algorithm optimizes motion of the bus by using model predictive control (MPC) using road geometry as constraints.