Smart management of actuator saturation in integrated vehicle control

Integrated control design to guarantee vehicle stability is one of the main topics in vehicle control. Actuators saturation is a main concern when dealing with this issue. In this work, we propose a fully integrated control by means of three actuators: Active Front Steering (AFS), Rear Torque Vectoring (RTV) and Semi-Active Suspensions (SAS). A feedback controller is used to ensure, in absence of input saturation, the exponential tracking of the reference trajectories. On top of that, a smart saturation management scheme detects when the actuators approach the occurrence of saturation, and determines a policy to avoid actuator saturations. The performance of the resulting control strategy, that is hybrid in general, is tested in simulation and compared with some classical solutions. © 2011 IEEE.