Vehicle yaw-inertia- and mass-independent adaptive steering control

This paper describes a vehicle stability control (VSC) system using a vehicle yaw-inertia- and mass-independent adaptive control law. As a primary vehicle active control system, VSC can significantly improve vehicle driving safety for passenger cars and enhance trajectory tracking accuracy for other applications such as autonomous, surveillance, and mobile robot vehicles. For the designs of vehicle dynamic control systems, vehicle yaw inertia and mass are two of the most important parameters. However, in practical applications, vehicle yaw inertia and mass often change with vehicle payload and load distribution. In this paper, an adaptive control law is proposed to treat the vehicle yaw inertia and mass as unknown parameters and automatically address their variations. For the proposed adaptive control law, asymptotic stability of the yaw rate tracking error was proved by a Lyapunov-like analysis for certain vehicle architectures under some reasonable assumptions. The performance of the yaw-inertia- and mass-independent adaptive VSC system was evaluated under several driving conditions (i.e. double lane changing on a slippery surface and braking on a split- μ surface tests) through simulation studies using a high-fidelity full-vehicle model provided by CarSim®.