Toward automated vehicle control beyond the stability limits via active drifting control

Professional drivers in drifting competitions demonstrate accurate control over a car's position and sideslip while operating in an open-loop unstable region of state space. Could similar approaches help autonomous cars contend with excursions past the stable handling limits, thereby improving overall safety outcomes?

Developing controllers for automated drifting could provide great insight into the general problem of fully utilizing the entire state space and ensuring that the widest possible range of maneuvers is available to an autonomous vehicle, should the need arise. When drifting, a standard assumption is removed - the orientation of the vehicle's velocity vector no longer follows that of the vehicle body. Although this at first seems daunting, the controller derivation instead reveals an opportunity: the rotation rate of the vehicle's velocity vector can now be used directly to track the path.

Then, by yawing the vehicle body faster or slower than its velocity vector, we can simultaneously control the sideslip of the vehicle.

The study will address the following objectives:

Vehicle dynamic modelling and simulation with the tire force saturation
Road-tire friction coefficient identification via vehicle state estimation
Precise vehicle drifting control beyond the stability limits. Improve the vehicle path tracking performance under limited driving conditions

References

Mohanty, A., Zawislak, R., Bhamidipati, S., & Gao, G. (2021, September). Precise relative positioning for tandem drifting cars. In Proceedings of the 34th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2021) (pp. 113-124).

Zhao, T., Yurtsever, E., Chladny, R., & Rizzoni, G. (2021, September). Collision Avoidance with Transitional Drift Control. In 2021 IEEE International Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC) (pp. 907-914). IEEE.

Subosits, J. K., & Gerdes, J. C. (2021). Impacts of model fidelity on trajectory optimization for autonomous vehicles in extreme maneuvers. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, 6(3), 546-558.

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This is a self funded topic

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