Vehicle Handling Improvement by Active Steering

Summary This paper first analyses some stability aspects of vehicle lateral motion, then a coprime factors and linear fractional transformations (LFT) based feedforward and feedback H 8 control for vehicle handling improvement is presented. The control synthesis procedure uses a linear vehicle model which includes the yaw motion and disturbance input with speed and road adhesion variations. The synthesis procedure allows the separate processing of the driver reference signal and robust stabilization problem or disturbance rejection. The control action is applied as an additional steering angle, by combination of the driver input and feedback of the yaw rate. The synthesized controller is tested for different speeds and road conditions on a nonlinear model in both disturbance rejection and driver imposed yaw reference tracking maneuvers.