Predictive Yaw Stability Control of a Brake-By-Wire Equipped Vehicle via Eddy Current Braking

Yaw stability of an automotive vehicle in a steering maneuver is critical to the overall safety of the vehicle. In this paper we present a theoretical development and experimental results of a vehicle yaw stability control system via eddy current braking based on generalized predictive control (GPC) method. The controller tries to predict the future yaw rate of the vehicle and then takes control action at present time based on future yaw rate error. The proposed controller utilizes the insight into the yaw rate error growth when the automobile is in an understeer or oversteer condition on a low friction coefficient surface in a handling maneuver. A brake-by-wire equipped vehicle having a set of four eddy current brakes was used to experimentally verify the proposed control algorithm. Experimental results show that the predictive feature of the proposed controller provides an effective way to control the yaw stability of a vehicle.