Finite Disturbance Directional Stability of Vehicles with Human Pilot Considering Nonlinear Cornering Behavior

The driver of a vehicle has a significant influence on handling and stability of the vehicle. Due to the complex behavior of a human pilot, a driver model is usually neglected when dealing with the problem of vehicle stability. This work focuses on the interaction between the vehicle and the human pilot. A model characterizing human operator behavior in a regulation task is employed to study directional stability. Linear stability is analyzed by the application of the Routh-Hurwitz criterion and stability boundaries separating the stable domain of operation of the driver from the unstable one are constructed.

The linear analysis predicts that the only possible instability in a driver/vehicle system is an oscillatory instability with increasing amplitude. It is shown that the addition of kinematic as well as slip angle nonlinearities in the vehicle model can have a stabilizing effect on these oscillations of the combined driver/vehicle system. They may also be responsible for the opposite, namely a linearly stable motion may become unstable to finite size disturbances. These nonlinear motions are predicted by a bifurcation analysis and are verified by direct numerical simulation.