The benefits of road friction feed forward control for improved vehicle handling

Vehicle stability augmentation has been refined over many years, and currently there are commercial systems that control right/left braking and throttle to create vehicles that remain controlled when road conditions are very poor. There have also been associated efforts to measure or estimate the road surface condition to provide additional information for the stability augmentation systems. Here, a road surface estimation is used as a feed forward signal in conjunction with a stability enhancement system designed principally to react to steering commands. It is shown that the road surface estimate offers significant improvement over the stability controller without road surface information. It is shown that even with estimate errors and time delays, it is still beneficial to use the road surface estimate.