Stability control for lateral vehicle motion with uncertain parameters and external nonlinearities

In this paper, the problem of tracking control for vehicle lateral dynamics is investigated, whose aim is to improve vehicle handling and stability, in the presence of parameter uncertainties and external nonlinearities. An adaptive robust controller (ARC) is designed based on backstepping technology to achieve two targets: the first one is to control the sideslip angle as small as possible; and the second one is to keep the real yaw rate tracking the desired yaw rate. In addition, to overcome the problem of “explosion of complexity” caused by backstepping method in the traditional ARC design, the filtering technique is used to estimate the derivative of the virtual control. Finally, a nonlinear vehicle model is employed as the design example to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control laws.