Insufficient Steering Angle During Curves in Autonomous Mode

[nu01kn]

I'm currently working on implementing autonomous driving using Autoware.
However, I’m running into some issues, and I would greatly appreciate any advice or insights.

When driving the vehicle, the steering command during curves appears to be insufficient, and the vehicle fails to follow the planned path properly.

Previously, I tested driving using only the VehicleInterface with a rosbag that includes /control_cmd messages from an earlier successful run through the curve.
In that test, I used a custom graphing tool within the VehicleInterface, and the steering command reached around -30 degrees — the vehicle was able to follow the curve correctly.

However, when I use Autoware to calculate the path and press the Auto button to begin autonomous driving, the resulting graph shows the steering command only reaching around -14 degrees.
This seems to be an incorrect command and might be the reason the vehicle cannot make the turn.

Has anyone experienced something similar or have any idea what might be causing this?

I’m using a custom vehicle interface that converts /control_cmd to CAN messages and sends them to the vehicle.
The interface also receives CAN signals and publishes vehicle_status, including velocity, steering angle, and heading rate (calculated from the wheelbase, velocity, and steering angle).

If any additional information is needed to help investigate this issue, please let me know.

Vehicle: Golf cart
Onboard sensors:
・LiDAR: VLP-16 → /sensing/lidar/top
・IMU
・GNSS

[maxime-clem]

Are you able to record all the output topics of the lateral controller ? This would help analyze the issue.
It is hard to tell what the issue is from just the plots you shared. The only thing I can think of is that the steering rate limit is incorrectly set and prevents the steering angle from changing fast enough.
I am also curious how you generated the "successful" input control commands.

[nu01kn]

Thank you for your reply.

Apologies, but I'm still not entirely sure which specific topic corresponds to the lateral controller.
I checked some topics that seemed possibly related, but I'm not sure how to properly verify whether they are the right ones.

Regarding the steering_rate_limit is my understanding correct that it refers to the setting in motion_velocity_smoother.param.yaml?
If so, max_steering_angle_rate was set to 11.5 [deg/s].
I temporarily changed it to 35.0 [deg/s] and tested the behavior, but unfortunately the vehicle still couldn’t make the turn.
I also tried setting enable_steering_rate_limit to false, but the result was the same — no improvement.

For the control command, I used AWSIM to record /control_cmd during a curve similar to the one in the real environment, and I am using that data for testing.

[maxime-clem]

Thank you for the additional details.

The max steering angle should be set in the vehicle_info.param.xml file (see https://autowarefoundation.github.io/autoware-documentation/main/how-to-guides/integrating-autoware/creating-vehicle-and-sensor-model/creating-vehicle-model/), and the vehicle model should be properly set in the MPC parameters (see https://autowarefoundation.github.io/autoware_universe/main/control/autoware_mpc_lateral_controller/#vehicle-model).

Are you using the same vehicle description as with AWSIM ?

[nu01kn]

I have already created a vehicle-specific vehicle_launch_package, and vehicle_info.param.yaml is correctly configured.
(max_steer_angle is set to 0.64 [rad])
Also, during launch, I’m specifying the pre-configured vehicle_launch with the appropriate vehicle_model, so it should be loaded properly.

This issue might be due to insufficient parameter tuning of the MPC Lateral Controller.
I’ll investigate this further.