Driver Reference Generation and Integrated Vehicle Lateral Dynamics Control

With the increase in number of vehicles and amount of traffic, safety has come out to be a big concern in vehicle’s dynamic stability. There are certain system’s limits beyond which if a vehicle is pushed it may become unstable. One of the major areas of research in vehicle dynamics control has been lateral velocity and yaw rate control. With this, situations like vehicle spinning, oversteer, understeer etc. can be addressed. The challenge for the next generations of vehicle control is the integration of the available actuators into a unique holistic control concept. This paper presents the driver reference generator developed for the Integrated Vehicle Dynamics Control concept. The driver reference generator processes the driver inputs to determine the target vehicle behavior. The generation of reference behavior is a key factor for the integrated control design. The driver reference generation is validated on a real vehicle. The driver reference generation consists of three different parts such as steady state linear response, steady state nonlinear response and dynamic calibration. Dynamic calibration is required in situations when system’s behavior gets sudden deviation in its linear response region. Control and actuation at steering wheel leads to operation of the system in its linear region, controllers like PID, Smith Predictor are implemented to achieve high Gain Margin(GM) and high robustness and their results are compared.