Nonlinear Coordinated Motion Control of Road Vehicles After a Tire Blowout

For the path-following and safety problem of road vehicles after a tire blowout, a nonlinear coordinated motion controller is proposed in the framework of the triple-step method that potentially benefits the engineering-oriented implementation. A control optimization strategy for coordinating both steering and braking is developed to enhance the control performance and deal with the constraints. Since only the primary impacts of the flat tire are taken into account in the vehicle dynamics model used for controller design, an improved robust design procedure is proposed in the framework of input-to-state stability theory to counteract the model uncertainties. The proposed coordinated controller is evaluated together with steering-alone controller and braking-alone controller, and the comparative results for different tire blow-out scenarios are analyzed. The results and analyses clearly show the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed approach.