Vehicle Yaw Inertia and Mass Independent Adaptive Control for Stability and Trajectory Tracking Enhancements

This paper describes a vehicle stability control (VSC) system using a 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 wheeled 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, asymptotical stability of the yaw rate tracking error was proved by a Lyapunov-like analysis for certain vehicle architecture under some reasonable assumptions. The performance of the yaw inertia and mass independent adaptive vehicle stability control system was evaluated under several driving conditions (Le. double lane-changing on a slippery surface and brake on a split-P surface tests) through simulation studies using a high-fidelity full-vehicle model provided by CarSim (R).