Nonlinear Model Predictive Lateral Stability Control of Active Chassis for Intelligent Vehicles and Its FPGA Implementation

The rapid development of intelligent vehicles has paved the way for active chassis lateral stability, which is a novel issue and critical to vehicle stability and handling performance. To obtain active chassis lateral stability for intelligent vehicles, a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) method integrating active front steering and an additional yaw moment is proposed. It adopts the tire sideslip angle to express vehicle lateral stability, and addresses the actuator and security constraints and the nonlinear properties of the tire-road force effectively. Moreover, the hardware implementation, based on the field programmable gate array (FPGA), is presented to satisfy miniaturization and to discuss the computational efficiency of the proposed NMPC method. To verify the effectiveness of the presented NMPC method, offline simulations comparing the NMPC method with the direct yaw moment control (DYC) method under various running conditions and a real-time implementation experiment are carried out. The results indicate that the proposed NMPC method controls better than the DYC-based method. In addition, the presented NMPC method exhibits good robustness when the longitudinal velocity and tire-road friction coefficient vary within a suitable range. Moreover, the computational time of the proposed NMPC controller, implemented using the FPGA, is only 4.994 ms during one sampling period, which can satisfy the real-time requirement of active chassis lateral stability control.