The safety and comfort control of vehicles by the separation principle of PID controller tuning

The safety and comfort control of vehicles in certain cases is considered in this paper. We hope to use detectors plus advanced control methods to realize the satisfactory tracking control, even the proper velocity and acceleration control of vehicles. Because of the intrinsically nonlinear, highly plant uncertain of vehicles and closely interconnected among vehicles, here the method based on the new separation principle (NSP) of tuning PID controller is used. First, the control method is extended to systems with variable control gain and delay in control input. It is the method that, without using of estimator or observer, we can reject system´s uncertain parts, disturbances or interconnected parts effectively. So the structure of the control system is relatively a simple one. Second, as its application, we use the results for the control of vehicles in three cases, such as in case of emergency, moving in platoon form and with delay in control input. It is the robustness of the method that, by using little information, we can still get rather good control performance, especially for high accuracy desired output tracking of velocity and acceleration, even with a good transient response. And some simulation results for the comparison of relative positions, velocities and accelerations are shown to demonstrate the efficiency of the method.