Active steering Control Based on The Estimated Tire Forces

Steering of the vehicles on a slippery highway is a difficult task for most passenger car drivers. The steering vehicles on slippery roads tend to slide outward with less lateral forces than on nor mal roads. When the drivers notice that their vehicles on a slippery highway start to depart from the cornering lane, most of them make a sudden steering and/or braking, which in turn may induce spin-out and instability on their vehicles. In this paper, an active steering control method is proposed such that the vehicles in slippery roads are steered as if they are driven on the normal roads. In the proposed method, the estimated lateral forces acting on the steering tires are compared with the reference values and the difference is compensated by the active steering method. A fuzzy logic controller is designed for this purpose and evaluated on a steering Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation (HILS) system. Steering performance results on the slippery curved and sinus roads demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller. This method can be realized with the steer-by-wire concept and is promising as an active safety technology.