Adaptive Sliding Mode-Based Lateral Stability Control of Steer-by-Wire Vehicles With Experimental Validations

In this paper, a robust adaptive sliding mode (ASM) controller for improving vehicle maneuverability and lateral stability of steer-by-wire (SBW) vehicles. The proposed stability control algorithm is composed of the following three remarkable characteristics: 1) As the vehicle sideslip angle which is very useful in vehicle stability control is often unavailable or unmeasurable for practical applications, a sliding mode-based state observer is proposed to online estimate the actual sideslip angle via the yaw rate and the lateral acceleration measurements. 2) ASM lateral stability controller, as an upper level controller, is designed to calculate the corrected steering angle for driving both the yaw rate and the sideslip angle to achieve their desired values in the presence of modelling uncertainties and external disturbances. Moreover, an adaptive law is incorporated in the control law to estimate the switching gain such that the complex uncertainty bound information can be avoided. 3) The desired steering angle is realized by a lower steering controller via ASM for an SBW system. The hardware-in-the-loop simulation results demonstrate the excellent stability control performance of the proposed control for different steering maneuvers.