Stability and Hopf Bifurcation of Four-Wheel-Steering Vehicles Involving Driver's Delay

A mathematical model is presented for four-wheel-steeringvehicles, with the time delay in driver's response and the nonlinearityin lateral tyre forces taken into account. It is proved that thevehicle-driver system has a trivial steady state motion, as well aseight non-trivial steady state motions due to the nonlinearity of tyreforces. The asymptotic stability and Hopf bifurcation of the trivialsteady state are analyzed for two control strategies ofrear-wheel-steering. It is shown through the numerical simulations thatthe four-wheel-steering technique based on the bilinear control strategyworks better when the driver's response involves time delay.