Tire Blowout Motion Control of Over-actuated Ground Vehicles: A Hierarchical Framework

Tire blowout of ground vehicle has greatly threaten the safety of the passengers and road traffic under expressway circumstances due to its suddenness and unpredictability, and human driver is generally hard to cope with such extremely dangerous maneuver. To this end, this paper proposes a hierarchical control scheme for the tire blow-out vehicle subjected to over-actuation, nonlinearity and uncertainty, which is composed of velocity observer, motion controller as well as tire force allocator. To be specific, a nonsingular terminal sliding-mode velocity observer is designed to estimating the essential velocity signals because of its finite-time convergence and robustness property. Further, based on observed velocity signals, a robust tube-based model predictive controller is proposed to enhance the lateral stability of the vehicle after tire blowout, where system uncertainty and external disturbances are taken into account. Together with the previously developed tire force allocator, the hierarchical observation-control-allocation framework is developed for the tire blow-out vehicle, which reduces the complexity of the system design, and enhances the robustness of control scheme. Finally, simulation results performed on Simulink-CarSim platform validated the effectiveness and superiority of the developed velocity observer as well as the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical framework and control methods. In future, the hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulation test will be conducted to further validate and improve the proposed control framework and approaches.