Vehicle Lateral Dynamics with Sliding Mode Control Strategy for Evasive Maneuvering

Developing a lateral controller specialized for evasive maneuvers is crucial for increasing vehicle occupants’ and road users’ safety. The controller must use all the vehicle’s dynamic capacity to avoid or mitigate the crash severity in critical situations. In this work, we have developed a new lateral controller based on sliding mode control (SMC), considering a vehicle dynamic envelope. Its primary function is to define the steering angle while addressing tire lateral slip saturation. We have evaluated the controller using IPG CarMaker®. The simulation results reveal that the vehicle with the developed controller can perform an evasive lane change in less than 1.1 seconds for velocities up to 130 km/h on a dry road. Therefore it is beneficial to implement our controller in extreme conditions where a crash is foreseen up to 2 seconds, and longitudinal operations alone are not enough to avoid the crash.