Robust and Nonlinear Integrated Steering / Driving Force Control Using Sliding Mode Control with Iterative Computational Method for Front Steering Vehicles

Abstract

In this paper, a novel robust sliding mode steering and driving force controller for front steering ground vehicles with coupled nonlinear dynamic model is presented. Unlike the conventional front steering vehicle controllers, the proposed controller deals with longitudinal, lateral, and yaw motion simultaneously, including coupling nonlinear dynamics between them while ensuring robustness against the uncertainty and external disturbances. Since these coupled dynamics are nonlinear and difficult to solve them analytically, we use an iterative method which is feasible at real-time computation. It is noted that this iterative computation includes the effect of sliding mode controller; the numerically computed control is robust against external disturbance or uncertainty which satisfies the matching condition. The efficacy and advantage of the proposed controller over a conventional method is verified through both simulation and experiment.