Integrated Control of Active Steering and Electronic Differentials in Four Wheel Drive and Steering Vehicles Ph.D. Dissertation on Sensorial and Learning Systems

This thesis presents new results in the design and the integration of the active front/rear steering control with front/rear electronic differential in four wheel drive and steering vehicles; an application to vision based autonomous lane keeping control is also deployed. In four wheel steering vehicles it is shown that the lateral speed and yaw rate dynamics can be asymptotically decoupled by feeding back longitudinal speed and yaw rate measurements: lateral speed measurements or observers are not required. A proportional-integral (PI) active front steering control and a proportionalintegral (PI) active rear steering control from the yaw rate error together with an additive feedforward reference signal for the vehicle sideslip angle can asymptotically decouple the lateral velocity and the yaw rate dynamics, that is the control can set arbitrary steady state values for lateral speed and yaw rate at any longitudinal speed; moreover the PI controls can suppress oscillatory behaviours by assigning real stable eigenvalues to the basic linear model of the vehicle steering Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Roma-Italy