Emergency Motion Control of Autonomous Vehicles under Tire Blowout Conditions

As one of the most common types of traffic accidents, tire blowout has become a significant safety issue in the stability control of autonomous vehicles. This paper presents a coordinated control strategy for autonomous vehicles operating under tire blowout conditions. A simplified three-degree-of-freedom vehicle dynamics model and a preview-based kinematic model are developed to capture the complex interactions between lateral and longitudinal motions during a blowout event. Then, the proposed control framework integrates sliding mode control (SMC) with a prescribed-performance function to constrain lateral deviation and heading error within predefined boundaries. To improve emergency path tracking and ensure stability, a transformation-based error bounding method is introduced. Lyapunov-based stability analysis verifies the convergence properties of the closed-loop system. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method under both tubeless and tubed tire blowout scenarios. Compared to conventional SMC controllers, the proposed controller reduces lateral error convergence time by up to 58% while ensuring safe stopping within 2.2 seconds after blowout. These results indicate that the controller offers robust and reliable emergency motion control capabilities for autonomous vehicles in extreme tire failure situations.