ACTIVE FRONT STEERING DURING BRAKING PROCESS

An active front steering （AFS） intervention control during braking for vehicle stability is presented. Based on the investigation of AFS mechanism, a simplified model of steering system is established and integrated with vehicle model. Then the AFS control on vehicle handling dynamics during braking is designed. Due to the difficulties associated with the sideslip angle measurement of vehicle, a state observer is designed to provide real time estimation. Thereafter, the controller with the feedback of both sideslip and yaw angle is implemented. To evaluate the system control, the proposed AFS controlled vehicle has been tested in the Hardware-in-the-loop-simulation （HILS） system and compared with that of conventional vehicle. Results show that AFS can improve vehicle lateral stability effectively without reducing the braking performance.

Generalized Internal Model Robust Control for Active Front Steering Intervention

Because of the tire nonlinearity and vehicle＇s parameters＇uncertainties,robust control methods based on the worst cases,such as H_∞,μsynthesis,have been widely used in active front steering control,however,in order to guarantee the stability of active front steering system（AFS）controller,the robust control is at the cost of performance so that the robust controller is a little conservative and has low performance for AFS control.In this paper,a generalized internal model robust control（GIMC）that can overcome the contradiction between performance and stability is used in the AFS control.In GIMC,the Youla parameterization is used in an improved way.And GIMC controller includes two sections：a high performance controller designed for the nominal vehicle model and a robust controller compensating the vehicle parameters＇uncertainties and some external disturbances.Simulations of double lane change（DLC）maneuver and that of braking on split-μroad are conducted to compare the performance and stability of the GIMC control,the nominal performance PID controller and the H_∞controller.Simulation results show that the high nominal performance PID controller will be unstable under some extreme situations because of large vehicle＇s parameters variations,H_∞controller is conservative so that the performance is a little low,and only the GIMC controller overcomes the contradiction between performance and robustness,which can both ensure the stability of the AFS controller and guarantee the high performance of the AFS controller.Therefore,the GIMC method proposed for AFS can overcome some disadvantages of control methods used by current AFS system,that is,can solve the instability of PID or LQP control methods and the low performance of the standard H_∞controller.