Research on the Potential of Front Wheel Steering Control for Vehicle Dynamics Control

Abstract

The development of active steering control technology not only provides key actuators for intelligent vehicle motion control, but also expands vehicle stability and safety. This paper studies the potential control ability of the front-wheel steering control to the vehicle plane dynamics, and the controllable area boundary is designed on the phase plane of side slip angle and yaw rate. Previous studies have defined a dynamics stable area on the vehicle states phase plane, in which the vehicle state can autonomously return to a stable equilibrium point. The area outside the stable area are divided into the controllable area and the uncontrollable area in this paper. In the controllable area, the front-wheel steering control has the ability to pull the vehicle states back towards the stable area. Considering actuator constraints and model errors, based on the principle of safety design, a band-shaped critical area is designed to separate the controllable area from the uncontrollable area, and the linear mathematical model of the controllable area boundary is designed. In order to verify the rationality of the controllable area definition, nonlinear model predictive controller is designed to control the vehicle outside the dynamics stable area. The controller uses the high-fidelity nonlinear vehicle model and the magic formula tire model as the state equation constraints, and the practical steering actuator constraints are used as the control input constraints, and the nonlinear numerical optimization solver is used to solve the optimal steering input sequence. The phase plane analysis of the controlled vehicle verifies the rationality of the controllable area defined in this paper.