Vehicle safety enhancement through a novel active yaw stabilizer

This paper presents a novel active yaw stabilizer (AYS) based on an in-wheel motor control system. Locating a controlled in-wheel motor system in the common spare tire location of a sedan vehicle, the introduced AYS is realized by moving the controlled in-wheel motor along a designed orbit. Through controlling two torques commanded for the self-rotation of the in-wheel motor and the movement along the orbit, the introduced two yaw moments can be applied to provide additional control inputs to enhance the vehicle active safety. The model of the introduced AYS is first developed and then integrated with the vehicle lateral motion model. Based on the combined nonlinear system model, a nonlinear tracking controller based on Lyapunov theory is designed. The control effects to stabilize the vehicle yaw motion on road with different friction coefficients for a double lane change maneuver are successfully demonstrated through a co-simulation with MATLAB/Simulink^® and CarSim^®.