Low Vibration Vehicle Traction Control to Solve Fastest Acceleration/Deceleration Problems Via Second Order Sliding Modes

A traction force controller for passenger cars is presented in this paper to solve, in particular, the problem of guaranteeing the satisfaction of the fastest stable acceleration/deceleration conditions during vehicle operations. This problem is, for instance, an important subtask in the design of Intelligent vehicles/highways systems (IVHS), but it can be considered crucial also for any kind of modern medium to high-performance commercial cars. Due to system uncertainties, time-varying road conditions, and the wide range of operating conditions, which are typical of the automotive context, a robust control technique is required to solve this problem. The robust control methodology adopted in this paper is the so-called second order sliding mode control, which results particularly suitable to deal with uncertain nonlinear time-varying systems. Moreover, in contrast to conventional sliding mode control, second order sliding mode control generates continuous control actions, the discontinuities being confined to the derivatives of the control signals, thus resulting particularly suitable to be applied to automotive systems where vibrations suppression is a crucial requirement.