Predictive control for improving vehicle handling and stability

In the modern era active front steering (AFS) Control has been introduced in automotive industry due to increased vehicle maneuverability resulting risk of instability and the objective to reduce the occurrence of accidents. In this paper a novel control strategy of Model predictive controller (MPC) controller with robust optimal guaranteed cost feedback controller (OGCC) is introduced for AFS control. In the proposed scheme MPC is designed to compensate for the effect of the driver´s steering input modeled as a known disturbance and giving the optimal solution by satisfy the control input constraint, while the OGCC controller is trying to render the system robust to the effect of system uncertainties whilst achieving acceptable performance for tracking the desired vehicle trajectory. The complete controller scheme achieves the best results with root mean square error of less then 10^-4, whilst guaranteeing the stability of vehicle in the presence of uncertain environment. Numerical simulation results are performed to the effectiveness of the proposed approach over other conventional techniques.