Coordination of Independent Steering and Torque Vectoring in a Variable-Geometry Suspension System

Abstract

In this paper, the coordination and control design of a variable-geometry suspension is proposed, in which independent steering and torque vectoring are integrated. The motivation of this paper is the research on the novel smart actuators for autonomous urban vehicles, by which various functionalities can be achieved. The goal of this paper is to propose a control design for trajectory tracking with increased reachability domain. Therefore, in this paper, the hierarchical control design of the suspension system using robust and linear-parameter varying (LPV) methods is presented. The robust stability of the hierarchy is guaranteed through the modeling of the uncertainties of different control layers. Furthermore, the coordination of independent steering and torque vectoring is proposed, which is based on a nonlinear reachability analysis of the interventions. The efficiency of the prosed method is presented through the high-complexity simulation software of the vehicle dynamics (CarSim) and the suspension construction (SimMechanics).