Disturbance observer based control for four wheel steering vehicles with model reference

This paper presents a disturbance observer based control strategy for four wheel steering systems in order to improve vehicle handling stability. By combination of feedforward control and feedback control, the front and rear wheel steering angles are controlled simultaneously to follow both the desired sideslip angle and the yaw rate of the reference vehicle model. A nonlinear three degree-of-freedom four wheel steering vehicle model containing lateral, yaw and roll motions is built up, which also takes the dynamic effects of crosswind into consideration. The disturbance observer based control method is provided to cope with ignored nonlinear dynamics and to handle exogenous disturbances. Finally, a simulation experiment is carried out, which shows that the proposed four wheel steering vehicle can guarantee handling stability and present strong robustness against external disturbances.