Guaranteed Cost Model Predictive Control-based Driver Assistance system for vehicle stabilization under tire parameters uncertainties

Road traffic crashes have been the leading cause of death among young people. Most of these accidents occur when the driver becomes distracted and a loss-of-control situation occurs. Steer-by-Wire systems were recently proposed as an alternative to mitigate such accidents. This technology enables the decoupling of the front wheel steering angles from the driver hand wheel angle and, consequently, the measurement of road/tire friction limits and the development of novel control systems capable of ensuring vehicle stabilization and safety. However, vehicle safety boundaries are highly dependent on tire characteristics which vary significantly with temperature, wear and the tire manufacturing process. Therefore, design of autonomous vehicle and driver assistance controllers cannot assume that these characteristics are constant or known. Thus, this paper proposes a Guaranteed Cost Model Predictive Controller Driver Assistance System able to avoid front and rear tire saturation and to track the drivers intent up to the limits of handling for a vehicle with uncertain tire parameters. Simulation results show the performance of the proposed approach under time-varying uniformly distributed disturbances.