Vehicle Integrated Chassis Control via Multi-Input Multi-Output Sliding Mode Control

Integrated chassis control (ICC) systems are designed to coordinate the control actions of individual chassis control systems, in order to achieve superior overall control performance. Many existing ICC systems employ an implicit mechanism to allocate/distribute the global target control action between the subsystems, which may lead to contradictory or suboptimal individual control actions. To deal with this shortcoming, this paper proposes an ICC solution based on multi-input multi-output sliding mode control. The coupled dynamics between the vehicle states to be controlled are explicitly incorporated in the proposed control design, and the control actions of active rear steer (ARS) and direct yaw-moment control (DYC) are jointly determined by the controller rather than allocated or distributed from a global target control action. Simulink-CarSim co-simulation results show that the ARS and DYC subsystems are well coordinated by the proposed controller to achieve favorable vehicle responses, including side slip angle, yaw rate and vehicle path. under a challenging driving condition.