Data-Driven Design of Braking Control Systems

The spread of active braking controllers on vehicles with significant mechanical differences and on low-cost products asks for control design approaches which offer easy and fast calibration and re-tuning capabilities. This task is made difficult by the use of model-based control approaches which heavily rely on specific vehicle dynamics descriptions. To address these issues, this brief paper proposes a data-driven approach to active braking control design, grounded on the virtual reference feedback tuning (VRFT) approach complemented with a data-driven nonlinear compensator. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is assessed both on a full-fledged multibody simulator and on a tire-in-the-loop experimental facility.