Implementation and experimental evaluation of a MIMO drifting controller on a test vehicle

In the future, the presence of highly automated vehicles is expected to become more and more wide spread. In such systems, the whole driving task will be performed by the vehicle autonomously, thus, vehicles must be able to control their motion in various circumstances, even at stability limits. In this paper, the authors consider the control of a steady-state drifting maneuver, which means saturated rear tire forces. In a previous article, a MIMO linear quadratic regulator (LQR) controller was designed, and it showed good performance in simulation environment. The test results of a real vehicle implementation are presented here, which was the logical next step of the work. For the vehicle platform, a series production sports car was chosen. Modifications were made in order to enable by-wire control. After identifying the vehicle model parameters through measurements, the control algorithm was implemented on a rapid prototyping unit. Vehicle states were measured with a high precision dual antenna GNSS module with RTK correction. Additionally, other dynamic parameters from the vehicle CAN bus signals were also used. The main goal was to stabilize different drifting equilibria, which showed satisfying performance of the proposed controller in a real vehicle setup as well.