Applications of model predictive control to vehicle dynamics for active safety and stability [electronic resource]
Keywords: Mechanical Engineering

Each year in the United States, thousands of lives are lost as a result of loss of control crashes. Production driver assistance systems such as electronic stability control (ESC) have been shown to be highly effective in preventing many of these automotive crashes, yet these systems rely on a sensor suite that yields limited information about the road conditions and vehicle motion. Furthermore, ESC systems rely on gains and thresholds that are tuned to yield good performance without feeling overly restrictive to the driver. This dissertation presents an alternative approach to providing stabilization assistance to the driver which leverages additional information about the vehicle and road that may be obtained with advanced estimation techniques. This new approach is based on well-known and robust vehicle models and utilizes phase plane analysis techniques to describe the limits of stable vehicle handling, alleviating the need for hand tuning of gains and thresholds. The resulting state space within the computed handling boundaries is referred to as a safe handling envelope. In addition to the boundaries being straightforward to calculate, this approach has the benefit of offering a way for the designer of the system to directly adjust the controller to accomodate the preferences of different drivers. A model predictive control structure capable of keeping the vehicle within the safe handling boundaries is the final component of the envelope control system. This dissertation presents the design of a controller that is capable of smoothly and progressively augmenting the driver steering input to enforce the boundaries of the envelope. The model predictive control formulation provides a method for making trade-offs between enforcing the boundaries of the envelope, minimizing disruptive interventions, and tracking the driver's intended trajectory. Experiments with a steer-by-wire test vehicle demonstrate that the model predictive envelope control system is capable of operating in conjunction with a human driver to prevent loss of control of the vehicle while yielding a predictable vehicle trajectory. These experiments considered both the ideal case of state information from a GPS/INS system and an a priori friction estimate as well as a real-world implementation estimating the vehicle states and friction coefficient from steering effort and inertial sensors. Results from the experiments demonstrated a controller that is tolerant of vehicle and tire parameterization errors and works well over a wide range of conditions. When real time sensing of the states and friction properties is enabled, the results show that coupling of the controller and estimator is possible and the model predictive control structure provides a mechanism for minimizing undesirable coupled dynamics through tuning of intuitive controller parameters. The model predictive control structure presented in this dissertation may also be considered as a general framework for vehicle control in conjunction with a human driver. The structure utilized for envelope control may also be used to restrict other vehicle states for safety and stability. Results are presented in this dissertation to show that a model predictive controller can coordinate a secondary actuator to alter the planar states and reduce the energy transferred into the roll modes of the vehicle. The systematic approach to vehicle stabilization presented in this dissertation has the potential to improve the design methodology for future systems and form the basis for the inclusion of more advanced functions as sensing and computing capabilities improve. The envelope control system presented here offers the opportunity to advance the state of the art in stabilization assistance and provides a way to help drivers of all skill levels maintain control of their vehicle.