Mechatronic control of the car response based on VFC

This paper is addressed to the analysis of an autonomous vehicle as a first step of an on-going project at the Mechatronic and Vehicle Dynamic Lab of Sapienza. The project is developing an experimental setup for a series city car to be equipped with a complete assisted integrated system of mechatronic type, controlling the steering and the wheel torques. In this paper we develop a complete car model for its dynamic response, including the car body dynamics, tires that can rely on the previous controls and on a control logic that is based on a new strategy, the FLOP control. This kind of control, recently developed by the Sapienza team, relies on optimal control theory of Pontryagin type, that has been revisited transforming the global optimality problem into a set of local optima along the system trajectory. This method provides a chance for an efficient feedback control of the vehicle in an environment in which moving obstacles and external noise are present. Numerical results complete the analysis.