Nonlinear adaptive tracking for ground vehicles

In this paper we design of an adaptive scheme for controlling the attitude of a ground vehicle. This control ensures the tracking of desired references for lateral and angular references, in presence of uncertainties in the parameters describing the tire-road friction coefficient and the lateral tire stiffness, and in presence of external perturbation, such as lateral wind. The proposed adaptive control scheme allows the identification of the disturbance acting on the vehicle and, at the same time, behaves well also in presence of sudden changes of the friction coefficient, in the case of vehicle parameter variations, and in presence of wind gusts.