Stability control of a vehicle in autonomous safety-critical at-the-limit manoeuvres is analysed from the perspective of lane keeping or lane changing, rather than that of yaw control as in traditional ESC systems. An optimal control formulation is developed, where the optimisation criterion is a linear combination of the initial and final velocity of the manoeuvre. Varying the interpolation parameter in this formulation turns out to result in an interesting family of optimal braking and steering patterns in stabilising manoeuvres. The two different strategies of optimal lane-keeping control and optimal yaw control are shown to be embedded in the formulation and result from the boundary values of the parameter. The results provide new insights and have the potential to be used for future safety systems that adapt the level of braking to the situation at hand, which is demonstrated through examples of how to exploit theresults.

With new developments in sensor technology, a new generation of vehicle dynamics controllers is developing, where the braking and steering strategies use more information, e.g. knowledge of road borders. The basis for vehicle-safety systems is how the forces from tyre–road interaction is vectored to achieve optimal total force and moment on the vehicle. To study this, the concept of attainable forces previously proposed in literature is adopted, and here a new visualisation technique is devised. It combines the novel concept of attainable force volumes with an interpretation of how the optimal solution develops within this volume. A specific finding is that for lane-keeping it is important to maximise the force in a certain direction, rather than to control the direction of the force vector, even though these two strategies are equivalent for the friction-limited particle model previously used in some literature for lane-keeping control design. More specifically, it is shown that the optimal behaviour develops on the boundary surface of the attainable force volume. Applied to lane-keeping control, this observation indicates a set of control principles similar to those analytically obtained for friction-limited particle models in earlier research, but result in vehicle behaviour close to the globally optimal solution also for more complex models and scenarios.

A simplified combined-slip model that only considers the extreme case at the friction limit is suggested and used in a closed-loop controller for autonomous vehicle handling in at-the-limit maneuvers. In the development of the controller it is assumed that the front wheels are individually steered, but it is demonstrated in a left-hand turn scenario that with a simple adaptation, the method is still applicable for a vehicle with equal front-wheel angles.

Handling of critical situations is an important part in the architecture of an autonomous vehicle. A controller for autonomous collision avoidance is developed based on a wary strategy that assumes the least tireroad friction for which the maneuver is still feasible. Should the friction be greater, the controller makes use of this and performs better. The controller uses an acceleration-vector reference obtained from optimal control of a friction-limited particle, whose applicability is verified by using numerical optimization on a full vehicle model. By employing an analytical tire model of the tireroad friction limit, to determine slip references for steering and body-slip control, the result is a controller where the computation of its output is explicit and independent of the actual tire-road friction. When evaluated in real-time on a high-fidelity simulation model, the developed controller performs close to that achieved by offline numerical optimization.

A minimum-time lane change maneuver is executed under friction-limited conditions using (1) the Modified Hamiltonian Algorithm (MHA) suitable for real-time control and (2) numerical optimization for comparison. A key variable is the switching time of the acceleration reference in MHA. Considering that MHA is based on an approximate vehicle model to target real-time control, it cannot exactly match the ideal reference as obtained from offline optimization; this paper shows that incorporation of a limited-jerk condition successfully predicts the switching time and that the desired lane position is reached in near minimum time.

A controller for critical vehicle maneuvering is proposed that avoids obstacles and keeps the vehicle on the road while achieving heavy braking. It operates at the limit of friction and is structured in two main steps: a motion-planning step based on receding-horizon planning to obtain acceleration-vector references, and a low-level controller for following these acceleration references and transforming them into actuator commands. The controller is evaluated in a number of challenging scenarios and results in a well behaved vehicle with respect to, e.g., the steering angle, the body slip, and the path. It is also demonstrated that the controller successfully balances braking and avoidance such that it really takes advantage of the braking possibilities. Specifically, for a moving obstacle, it makes use of a widening gap to perform more braking, which is a clear advantage of the online replanning capability if the obstacle should be a moving human or animal. Finally, real-time capabilities are demonstrated. In conclusion, the controller performs well, both from a functional perspective and from a real-time perspective.