Four wheel optimal autonomous steering for improving safety in emergency collision avoidance manoeuvres

The objective of this work is to demonstrate that autonomous collision avoidance manoeuvres based on optimal control motion planning improve the safety margins and can fully exploit the vehicle dynamics. In particular we analyse the performance of a traditional two-wheel-steering vehicle (2WS) versus a four-wheel-steering vehicle (4WS) in steer-to-avoid manoeuvres. We show how the vehicle manoeuvrability is improved using 4WS that allows to avoid an obstacle quite later with respect to the traditional 2WS vehicle. A control algorithm with novel features is also proposed to autonomously track the optimised manoeuvres, which has been successfully tested on a 4WS electric vehicle.