Nonsmooth dynamic surface control of non-Lipschitz nonlinear systems with application to brake control

Successful longitudinal control of a vehicle in an intelligent vehicle and highway system (IVHS) or autonomous intelligent cruise control (AICC) environment is highly dependent on the adequate control of the vehicle´s subsystems. Most of those systems are highly nonlinear and include a wide range of uncertainties. A method for designing stable controllers for uncertain, mismatched nonlinear systems is proposed. This method is similar to the one proposed by Swaroop et al. (1997) in that it is using multiple surface control methods with low pass filters included in the design. However, the method presented here uses nonsmooth control which has the benefit of reducing the final tracking error. Differential inclusion theory is used to prove the stability of this controller. This methodology is applied to the control of brake systems in an automated highway environment. A simplified brake model tailored for control applications is used to illustrate the methodology. Simulation and experimental results show the feasibility of such technique.