Predictive velocity control in a hilly terrain over a long look-ahead horizon

Paper in proceeding, 2018

This paper presents a computationally efficient velocity control of vehicles driving
in a possibly hilly terrain and over long look-ahead horizons that may stretch to hundreds of
kilometers. The controller decouples gear scheduling into an online optimization problem, from
the remaining optimization problem that governs two real-valued states. One of the states, the
travel time, is adjoined to the objective by applying the necessary optimality conditions, which
results into an online optimization problem that has kinetic energy as the single state. Finally
an inner approximation is proposed for the online problem to obtain a quadratic program that
can be solved efficiently. The efficiency of the proposed controller is shown for different horizon
lengths.