Adaptive vehicle planar motion control with fast parameter estimation

This paper presents a new adaptive control scheme for vehicle planar motion control with fast parameter estimation in moderate maneuvers in real-time. The parameters to be estimated include vehicle mass and yaw moment of inertia, which are important to the control systems for lightweight vehicles (LWVs) whose mass and yaw moment of inertia values change substantially with payload variations. A traditional Lyapunov-type adaptive control design rarely provides the bonus of accurate estimation of the true vehicle parameter values due to insufficient excitation in normal/moderate driving maneuvers. In this paper, to circumvent the obstacle of low adaptation rate, the traditional update law is supplemented with a new adaptive compensator to achieve much faster parameter convergence. The new design preserves the tracking performance and poses no additional requirements on the driving maneuvers. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptive scheme is capable of constructing true values of vehicle mass and yaw moment of inertia in just a few seconds once the corresponding persistent excitation is satisfied.