Robust Control and Linear Parameter Varying approaches: Application to Vehicle Dynamics

The main objective of the book is to demonstrate the value of this approach for controlling the dynamic behavior of vehicles. After some theoretical background and a view on some recent works on LPV approaches (for modelling, analysis, control, observation and diagnosis), themain emphasis is put on road vehicles but some illustrations are concerned with railway, aerospace and underwater vehicles. It presents, in a firm way, background and new results on LPV methods and their application to vehicle dynamics. The content of the book is as follows, and it is divided in 3 parts. In the first part some backgrounds on LPV systems are presented.Marco Lovera introduces first the concept of LPV systems in Chapter 1. Jozsef Bokor and Zoltan Szabo then presents in Chapter 2 some important features of the geometric approach for LPV systems analysis, and in Chapter 3, they introduce a specific class of LPV systems, namely the bimodal switching systems, where the switch from one mode to the other one depends on the state (closed-loop switching). In Chapter 4, Didier Henrion presents some recent results on LPV systems with positive polynomial matrices. Chapter 5, from Meriem Halimi, Gilles Millerioux and Jamal Daafouz, is dedicated to polytopic observers for LPV discrete-time systems. Chapter 6 tackles the fault diagnosis issue, and David Henry introduces the Fault Detection and Isolation LPV filters with some aerospace application. The second part concerns the application of LPV methods to road vehicles. First Anh-Lam Do, Charles Poussot-Vassal, Olivier Sename and Luc Dugard present some LPV control approaches in view of comfort improvement of automotive suspensions equipped with MR dampers.In Chapter 8 Peter Gaspar proposes some design methods of integrated control (of suspension, braking and steering actuators) for road vehicles. In Chapter 9, a coordinated control of braking/steering actuators through LPV technics is proposed by Charles Poussot-Vassal, Olivier Sename, Soheib Fergani, Moustapha Doumiati and Luc Dugard. In Chapter 10, John J. Martinez and Sebastien Varrier present some new results on Multisensor Fault-Tolerant Automotive Control in the LPV framework. In Chapter 11, some theory and application to braking control of the Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning approach for LPV systems, are presented by Simone Formentin, Giulio Panzani and Sergio M. Savaresi. This part is concluded by Peter Gaspar and Zoltan Szabo in Chapter 12, with the design of a hierarchical LPV controller of an active suspension system for a full-car vehicle. The third and final part is an opening to other vehicles such as railway, aerospace and underwater applications, for which the LPV approaches can be very attractive. First Peter Gaspar and Zoltan Szabo present in Chapter 13 an observer-based brake control for railways. Then Jean-Marc Biannic gives, in Chapter 14, a large overview of LPV control strategies for aerospace applications. Finally Chapter 15 by Emilie Roche, Olivier Sename and Daniel Simon, concludes the book with the design of LPV controllers with varying sampling for the altitude control of an AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle), where depth measurements are asynchronously supplied by acoustic sensors. We also would like to mention that this book is also part of the results of the 3- years bilateral collaboration project between the CNRS and the HungarianAcademy of Sciences: Robust and fault tolerant multivariable control for Automotive Vehicle. We would like to thank all the contributors for providing very nice and high level chapters in this book. We hope that this book will interest various researchers and graduate students in control of vehicle dynamics as wall as in robust control and LPV systems.