Vehicle stabilization in response to exogenous impulsive disturbances to the vehicle body

Road traffic statistics have shown that multi-event crashes typically result in a higher death toll than single-event crashes. One type of those multi-event crashes could be a crash where the initial harmful event leads to a loss of directional control of the vehicle. In this work, we study countermeasures during such crashes, namely, vehicle stabilization in response to exogenous impulsive disturbances. A vehicle collision model is developed to characterize vehicle motions due to a light impact, and a sensing scheme is proposed to detect crash events associated with loss of control afterwards. The stabilization controller, which is developed from the sliding surface control approach, is then activated and attenuates undesired vehicle motions via differential braking/active steering. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through CarSim simulations. This vehicle stabilization can be thought as a function extension to existing electronic stability control systems.