Robust guaranteed cost state-delayed vehicle lateral stability control with applications to in-wheel-motor-driven electric vehicles

This paper presents a robust guaranteed cost state-delayed control design with applications to in-wheel-motor-driven electric vehicles equipped with active front steering system. The main control objective is to deal with the time delay problem of steering system for improving vehicle lateral stability and handling performance. To address the challenging problem of time delay, the time delay of steering system is assumed to be concentrated in vehicle state. By constructing the Lyapunov-Krakovskii functional, sufficient condition for the existence of robust guaranteed cost state-delayed controller is given and solved via a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs).Simulations using a high-fidelity CarSim full-vehicle model are implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed controller in the platform of Matlab/Simulink-Carsim^®. It is confirmed from the simulation results that the proposed controller can effectively attenuate the delayed effect of steering system and preserve vehicle lateral stability and handling performance.