Vehicle dynamics

About: Vehicle dynamics is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 12909 publications have been published within this topic receiving 204091 citations.

Should the Desired Heading in Path Following of Autonomous Vehicles be the Tangent Direction of the Desired Path

Abstract: The path-following problem for autonomous vehicles is investigated in this paper. The desired vehicle heading is commonly chosen as the tangent direction on the desired path. This paper points out that the traditional definition of the desired heading may deteriorate the path-following performance, particularly when the vehicle is tracking a path with large curvature. That is because the sideslip angle control and the yaw rate control are conflicting in the presence of sliding effects, and the sideslip angle does not equal to zero when the vehicle is tracking a curve path. This paper further provides an amendment to the definition of the desired heading, which realizes a more accurate path-following maneuver. In the controller design phase, backstepping is used to generate the required yaw rate, and an LQR controller is adopted to obtain the optimal active front steering input. The CarSim–Simulink joint simulation verifies the reasonability of the amendment to the desired heading.

Torque blending and wheel slip control in EVs with in-wheel motors

Abstract: Among the many opportunities offered by electric vehicles (EVs), the design of power trains based on in-wheel electric motors represents, from the vehicle dynamics point of view, a very attractive prospect, mainly due to the torque-vectoring capabilities. However, this distributed propulsion also poses some practical challenges, owing to the constraints arising from motor installation in a confined space, to the increased unsprung mass weight and to the integration of the electric motor with the friction brakes. This last issue is the main theme of this work, which, in particular, focuses on the design of the anti-lock braking system (ABS). The proposed structure for the ABS is composed of a tyre slip controller, a wheel torque allocator and a braking supervisor. To address the slip regulation problem, an adaptive controller is devised, offering robustness to uncertainties in the tyre–road friction and featuring a gain-scheduling mechanism based on the vehicle velocity. Further, an optimisation framework ...

Orientation control of multiple underwater vehicles with symmetry-breaking potentials

Abstract: We present a control strategy for stable orientation alignment of autonomous vehicles traveling together as a coordinated group in three-dimensional space. The control law derives from an artificial potential that depends only on the relative orientation of pairs of vehicles. The result is a controlled system of coupled rigid bodies with partially broken rotational symmetry. Semidirect product reduction theory is used to study the closed-loop dynamics, and the energy-Casimir method is applied to the reduced dynamics to prove stability of an alignment of vehicles translating in parallel along the same body axis. For clarity, the theory is described in detail for the case of two underwater vehicles, and the extension to an arbitrary number of underwater vehicles is summarized.