Model Predictive Control for Vehicle Yaw Stability With Practical Concerns

This paper presents a method for electronic stability control (ESC) based on model predictive control (MPC) using the bicycle model with lagged tire force to reflect the lagged characteristics of lateral tire forces on the prediction model of the MPC problem for better description of the vehicle behavior. To avoid the computational burden in finding the optimal solution of the MPC problem using the constrained optimal control theory, the desired states and inputs as references are generated since the solution of the MPC problem can be easily obtained in a closed form without using numeric solvers using these reference values. The suggested method controls the vehicle to follow the generated reference values to maintain the vehicle yaw stability while the vehicle turns as the driver intended. The superiority of the proposed method is verified through comparisons with an ESC method based on ordinary MPC in the simulation environments on both high- and low-mu surfaces using the vehicle dynamics software CarSim.