Robust lateral motion control of distributed drive vehicle considering long input delays

Abstract

This article presents a comparative study of lateral motion controller design for distributed drive vehicle. Aiming at handling long input delays, two types of robust controllers are specifically investigated. First, a Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional based robust controller design is proposed. Considering input delay, the design conditions of the state-feedback controller are derived in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), which can be effectively solved using LMI toolbox. Second, based on the same control law, a robust predictive controller design is further presented. However, different from the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional based robust controller, the control gain of the proposed robust predictive controller is calculated without considering the input delay. An input delay estimator and a predictor are developed instead to reconstruct the delay-dependent state, which is further used to generate a new feedback error. Moreover, the feasibility of this control scheme is theoretically proved. Finally, extensive co-simulations with Carsim and Matlab/Simulink are conducted to compare the performance between these two controllers. Compared with the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional based robust controller, longer input delay can be handled by using the proposed robust predictive controller.