Side slip angle based control threshold of vehicle stability control system

Vehicle Stability Control (VSC) system prevents vehicle from spinning or drifting out mainly by braking intervention. Although a control threshold of conventional VSC is designed by vehicle characteristics and centered on average drivers, it can be a redundancy to expert drivers in critical driving conditions. In this study, a manual adaptation of VSC is investigated by changing the control threshold. A control threshold can be determined by phase plane analysis of side slip angle and angular velocity which is established with various vehicle speeds and steering angles. Since vehicle side slip angle is impossible to be obtained by commercially available sensors, a side slip angle is designed and evaluated with test results. By using the estimated value, phase plane analysis is applied to determine control threshold. To evaluate an effect of control threshold, we applied a 23-DOF vehicle nonlinear model with a vehicle planar motion model based sliding controller. Controller gains are tuned as the control threshold changed. A VSC with various control thresholds makes VSC more flexible with respect to individual driver characteristics.