Sliding Surface Envelope Control: Keeping the Vehicle Within a Safe State-Space Boundary

Stability control systems on the market today, while effective, operate without full information on the vehicle states and road friction properties. This paper presents a vehicle control scheme that takes into account vehicle state information on sideslip angle and yaw rate, as well as road coefficient of friction, to keep the vehicle within a safe region of the state space. The controller limits state growth outside of the safe area to a sliding surface defined by the distance to the closest operating point in the safe region. Experimental results validate a simple version of the controller on a low friction surface. The controller successfully stabilizes the vehicle using steer-by-wire as a control input.