Stability regions of vehicle lateral dynamics: estimation and analysis

A new method is proposed to estimate and analyze the vehicle lateral stability region, which provides a direct and intuitive demonstration for the safety and stability control of ground vehicles. Based on a four-wheel vehicle model and a nonlinear two-dimensional (2D) analytical LuGre tire model, a local linearization method is applied to estimate the vehicle lateral stability regions by analyzing the vehicle stability at each operation point on a phase plane, which includes but not limited to the equilibrium points. As the collections of all the locally stable operation points, the estimated stability regions are conservative because both vehicle and tire stability are simultaneously considered, which are especially important for characterizing the stability features of highly/fully automated ground vehicles (AGV). The obtained lateral stability regions can be well explained by the vehicle characteristics of oversteering and understeering in the context of vehicle handling stability. The impacts of vehicle lateral load transfer, longitudinal velocity, tire-road friction coefficient, and steering angle on the estimated stability regions are presented and discussed. To validate the correctness of the estimated stability regions, a case study by MATLAB/SIMULINK and CarSim^VR co-simulation is presented and discussed.