Adaptive Vehicle Lateral-Plane Motion Control Using Optimal Tire Friction Forces With Saturation Limits Consideration

This paper presents an adaptive nonlinear control scheme aimed at the improvement of the handling properties of vehicles. The control inputs for steering intervention are the steering angle and wheel torque for each wheel, i.e., two control inputs for each wheel. The control laws are obtained from a nonlinear 7-degree-of-freedom (DOF) vehicle model. A main loop and eight cascade loops are the basic components of the integrated control system. In the main loop, tire friction forces are manipulated with the aim of canceling the nonlinearities in a way that the error dynamics of the feedback linearized system has sufficient degrees of exponential stability; meanwhile, the saturation limits of tires and the bandwidth of the actuators in the inner loops are taken into account. A modified inverse tire model is constructed to transform the desired tire friction forces to the desired wheel slip and sideslip angle. In the next step, these desired values, which are considered as setpoints, are tackled through the use of the inner loops with guaranteed tracking performance. The vehicle mass and mass moment of inertia, as unknown parameters, are estimated through parameter adaptation laws. The stability and error convergence of the integrated control system in the presence of the uncertain parameters, which is a very essential feature for the active safety means, is guaranteed by utilizing a Lyapunov function. Computer simulations, using a nonlinear 14-DOF vehicle model, are provided to demonstrate the desired tracking performance of the proposed control approach.