On Generic Road Vehicle Motion Modelling and Control

Abstract: With the increased amount of on-board electric power driven by the ongoing hybridization, new ways to realize vehicles are likely to occur. This thesis outlines a future direction of vehicle motion control based on the assumptions that: 1) future vehicle development will face an increased amount of available actuators for vehicle propulsion and control that will open up for an increased variety of possible configurations, 2) the onboard computational power will continue to increase and allow higher demands on active safety and drivability that will require a tighter interaction between sensors and actuators, 3) the trend towards more individualized vehicles on common platforms with shorter time-to-market require design approaches that allow engineering knowledge to be transferred conveniently from one generation to the next.A methodology to facilitate the selection of vehicle configurations and the design of the corresponding vehicle motion controllers is presented. This includes a method to classify and map configurations and control strategies onto their possible influence on the vehicle's motion. Further, a structured way of implementing and managing vehicle and subsystem models that are easy to reconfigure and reuse is suggested and realised in the developed VehicleDynamics Library. In addition, generic ways to evaluate vehicle configurations, especially the use of the adhesion potential to identify safety margin and expected limit behaviour are presented.Special attention is given to how the characteristics of a vehicle configuration can be expressed so that it can be used in vehicle motion control design. A controller structure that enables a generic approach to this is introduced and within this structure, two methods for control allocation are proposed, via tyre forces and directly. The first method uses a developed mapping of available actuators as constraints onto the achievable tyre forces and inverse tyre models to calculate the actuator inputs. The second method allocates the actuator inputs directly for an adapted problem that is linearized around the current operating point. It is shown that the methods are applicable to a variety of different vehicle configurations without redesign. Therefore, the same controller can manage a variety of vehicle configurations and there is no need to recognize and treat each different situation separately.Finally, a road map on how to continue this research towards a possible industry implementation is given. Also suggestions on more detailed improvements for modelling and vehicle motion control are provided.