Development of a Four-Wheel Steering Scale Vehicle for Research and Education on Autonomous Vehicle Motion Control

Autonomous vehicle motion control development re- quires testing and evaluation at all stages of the process. The development phase involving the instrumentation and operation of a full-size vehicle can be especially costly. Scale vehicles have been developed in the literature to serve as a cost-effective tran- sition from testing in a simulation environment to a physical sys- tem. However, the existing scale vehicle platforms do not support four-wheel steering and cannot isolate the performance of motion control algorithms from other modules such as perception and path planning. This letter closes this gap by proposing a new scale vehicle platform, called JetRacer-4WS, based on the open-source JetRacer autonomous vehicle with additional modifications to sup- port four-wheel steering, model predictive control-based path fol- lowing, and high-precision ultrasonic-based real-time positioning. The proposed JetRacer-4WS can be used as a low-cost platform for both research and education on motion control, path following, and vehicle dynamics. We describe the design of JetRacer-4WS, and experimentally demonstrate JetRacer-4WS’ ability to perform controller auto-tuning and illustrate the advantage of four-wheel steering. We also show that JetRacer-4WS can be used as a val- idation platform for testing advanced control algorithms such as event-triggered model predictive control.