Design and Implementation of Adaptive Terminal Sliding-Mode Control on a Steer-by-Wire Equipped Road Vehicle

This paper proposes a novel adaptive terminal sliding-mode (ATSM) control scheme for a Steer-by-Wire (SBW) vehicle. It is shown that the developed ATSM controller can drive the closed-loop error dynamics to converge to zero in a finite time, where adaptive laws are applied to estimate the uncertain bounds of the system parameters and disturbances in Lyapunov sense. Compared with the sliding-mode-based SBW control systems, the proposed ATSM control not only assures the finite-time error convergence and strong robustness with respect to parameter uncertainties and varying driving conditions, but also requires no prior knowledge of the system parameters and road information. Experimental results from an SBW vehicle are demonstrated to verify the remarkable performance of the proposed control in terms of the robustness, error convergence, and road disturbance attenuation, in comparison with other control strategies.