Experiments of real-time numerical sliding mode control for vehicles

Since the longitudinal, lateral, and yaw dynamics of front steering vehicles are represented by nonlinear coupled equations, it is not easy to derive the explicit nonlinear controller of both steering angle and driving force for the perfect path-following control. In this paper, a novel and robust sliding mode controller for vehicles with coupled full dynamic model is presented. Comparing with the conventional vehicle controllers, this controller deals with coupled longitudinal, lateral, and yaw dynamics simultaneously, while ensuring stability and robustness for the uncertainty and external disturbances. Since these coupled dynamics are nonlinear and difficult to solve analytically, we use numerical solution which is feasible at real-time computation. In addition, to achieve robustness, this controller includes the sliding mode control to deal with uncertainty of road surface. The advantage of this controller is verified through experiments.