Feedback Linearizing Control of Vehicle Longitudinal Acceleration

This paper describes the application of recently developed feedback linearization techniques to controlling the powertrain of an automobile. one objective of powertrain control is to regulate the output torque of the engine and transmission system to achieve a desired longitudinal acceleration of the vehicle. With higher model order and increasing system complexity, the necessary and sufficient conditions for a nonlinear system to be feedback linearizable become harder to satisfy. The nonlinear control design method introduced in this paper uses local feedback (i) to force linear operation, and simultaneously, (ii) to achieve a time-scale separation of the powertrain subsystems. This time-scale separation decouples the powertrain into two simpler subsystems each satisfying the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a feedback linearizing control, and guarantees a prespecified input-output behavior of the overall system.