Active Ground Vehicle Control with use of a Super-Twisting Algorithm in the Presence of Parameter Variations

In this paper, we consider a vehicle equipped with active front steer and rear torque vectoring. While the former adds an incremental steer angle to the driver’s input, the latter imposes a torque by means of the rear axle. The active front steer control is actuated through the front tires, while the rear torque vectoring can be actuated through the rear tires. A nonlinear controller using the super–twisting algorithm is designed in order to track in finite time lateral and yaw angular velocity references. We consider one estimation method, given in the literature, to estimate the tire-road coefficient, and we design a dynamic controller to estimate the perturbing terms due to the vehicle’s mass and inertia variations, and due to the variation of the tire parameters. Comparisons with a simple PI- based controller are done, and some simulation results highlight the advantages of the proposed controller.