Vehicle lateral stability management using gain-scheduled robust control

This paper deals with the design of a yaw rate controller based on gain-scheduled H_∞ optimal control, which is intended to maintain the lateral stability of a vehicle. Uncertain factors such as vehicle mass and cornering stiffness in the vehicle yaw rate dynamics naturally call for the robustness of the feedback controller and thus H_∞, optimization technique is applied to synthesize a controller with guaranteed robust stability and performance against the model uncertainty. In the implementation stage, the feed-forward yaw moment by driver’s steer input is estimated by the disturbance observer in order to determine the accurate compensatory moment. Finally, HILS results indicate that the proposed yaw rate controller can satisfactorily improve the lateral stability of an automobile.