Observer-Based Robust Control of Vehicle Dynamics for Rollover Mitigation in Critical Situations

This paper describes a vehicle dynamics fuzzy control design to improve stability and minimize the rollover risk of the vehicle in critical situations. To obtain a robust controller, several aspects that directly affect the behavior of the vehicle have been considered. Nonlinearities of the lateral forces have been considered by using a Takagi-Sugeno (TS) representation, changes in road friction have been taken into account by introducing parameter uncertainties, and, finally, the road bank angle is considered as an unknown input in the used vehicle dynamics model. A TS observer has been proposed and designed with unmeasurable premise variables in order to consider the unavailability of the sideslip angle measurement. The observer and controller gains are simultaneously obtained by solving the proposed linear matrix inequalities constraints. A fishhook test is conducted in a CarSim simulator in order to illustrate the performance of the designed controller.