Robust adaptive control of steer-by-wire systems under unknown state-dependent uncertainties

Steer-by-wire (SBW) systems are considered as one of the most significant innovations among the technologies developed for advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous vehicles. The main control challenge in a SBW system is to follow the steering commands in the face of parametric uncertainties and external disturbances; crucially, perturbations in inertial parameters and damping forces give rise to state-dependent uncertainties, which cannot be bounded a priori by a constant. However, the state-of-the-art control methods of SBW system rely on a priori bounded uncertainties, and thus, become inapplicable when state-dependent dynamics become unknown. This work, to the best of the authors' knowledge for the first time, proposes an adaptive control framework that can tackle the state-dependent uncertainties and external disturbances in a typical SBW system without any a priori knowledge of their structures and of their bounds. The stability of the closed-loop system is studied analytically via uniformly ultimately bounded notion and the effectiveness of the proposed solution is verified via simulations against the state-of-the-art solution.