We are interested i n A GV applications since a long time, particularly in the eld of car vehicles and agricultural machines. This paper deals with the design of robust lateral controllers expressed directly in the sensor space. We use the camera sensor to extract an image of the position and orientation of the vehicle in regard with the white band, and consider the modelling of the projected line in image space a s the sensor signal. The kinematic modelling of the vehicle takes into account a normalization with respect to the vehicle velocity. We analyse the behaviour of lateral controllers designed w i t h a p ole assignment technique in presence of pipeline delays in the closed loop and perturbations. We particularly consider the perturbations on the inclination angle of the camera and on the camera height. Due to the problem of oscillations and instability of this approach, we investigate a H 1 robust control technique. To validate these approaches we have built an 1/10 scale road and we simulate the behaviour of the vehicle with a cartesian robot. We give some experimental results obtained with our experimental site.