Synthesis and Analysis of an Active Independent Front Steering (AIFS) System

Technological developments in road vehicles over the last two decades have received considerable attention towards pushing the safe performance limits to their ultimate levels. Towards this goal, Active Front Steering (AFS) and Direct Yaw-moment Control (DYC) systems have been widely investigated. AFS systems introduce corrective steering angles to the conventional system in order to realize a target handling response for a given speed and steering input. An AFS system, however, may yield limited performance under severe steering maneuvers involving substantial lateral load shift and saturation of the inside tire-road adhesion. The adhesion available at the outer tire, on the other hand, would remain under-utilized. This dissertation explores effectiveness of an Active Independent Front Steering (AIFS) system that could introduce a corrective measure at each wheel in an independent manner. The effectiveness of the AIFS system was investigated firstly through simulation of a yaw-plane model of a passenger car. The preliminary simulation results with AIFS system revealed superior potential compared to the AFS particularly in the presence of greater lateral load shift during a high-g maneuver. The proposed concept was thus expected to be far more beneficial for enhancement of handling properties of heavy vehicles, which invariably undergo large lateral load shift due to their high center of mass and roll motion. A nonlinear yaw-plane model of a two-axle single-unit truck, fully and partially loaded with solid and liquid cargo, with limited roll degree-of-freedom (DOF) was thus developed to study the performance potentials of AIFS under a range of steering maneuvers. A simple PI controller was synthesized to track the reference yaw rate response of a neutral steer vehicle. The steering corrections, however, were limited such that none of the tires approach saturation. For this purpose, a tire saturation zone was identified considering the normalized cornering stiffness property of the tire. The controller strategy was formulated so as to limit the work-load magnitude at a pre-determined level to ensure sufficient tire-road adhesion reserve to meet the braking demand, when exists. Simulation results were obtained for a truck model integrating AFS and AIFS systems subjected to a range of steering maneuvers, namely: a J-turn maneuver on uniform as well as split-μ road conditions, and path change and obstacle avoidance maneuvers. The simulation results showed that both AFS and AIFS can effectively track the target yaw rate of the vehicle, while the AIFS helped limit saturation of the inside tire and permitted maximum utilization of the available tire-road adhesion of the outside tire. The results thus suggested that the performance of an AIFS system would be promising under severe maneuvers involving simultaneous braking and steering, since it permitted a desired adhesion reserve at each wheel to meet a braking demand during the steering maneuver. Accordingly, the vehicle model was extended to study the dynamic braking characteristics under braking-in-turn maneuvers. The simulation results revealed the most meritorious feature of the AIFS in enhancing the braking characteristics of the vehicle and reducing the stopping time during such maneuvers. The robustness of the proposed control synthesis was subsequently studied with respect to parameter variations and external disturbance. This investigation also explores designs of fail-safe independently controllable front wheels steering system for implementation of the AIFS concept.