Sliding surface vehicle envelope control: A cooperative design between controller and envelope

While aircraft envelope control has become widespread, vehicle envelope control is still in its infancy. With the ability to estimate sideslip angle and friction coefficient through new methods, stability control systems can assimilate this information for a more complete view of the car´s planar dynamics. This paper presents a vehicle envelope controller centered around a computationally simple sliding surface control scheme, in which a cooperative design between the vehicle envelope and the controller mitigates negative aspects of the sliding surface controller while allowing the driver full access to the stable vehicle states. Finally, the sliding surface control scheme is augmented by a proportional control law that eliminates the remaining undesirable effects. The combined control law and envelope are verified with experimental results, using steer-by-wire as a control input.