On the Vehicle Stability and Maneuverability Domain Definition for Automated Vehicles

Vehicle safety is of a fundamental importance in the automotive industry and, with an increasing level of automation, the impact of vehicles on the global environment has to be investigated from a totality of different perspectives starting from pollution impact objectives up to the vehicle risk-prevention capabilities. For this reason, the state estimation techniques and the advanced control logics have being developed in recent years with the aim of improving the safety of the semi-automated vehicles, able to assist the driver in emergency situations minimizing the connected risks. Furthermore, the vehicle stability topic has acquired more interest since it could allow to pre-determine the vehicle stability and maneuverability regions, optimizing both the real-time computational efficiency of the control-related logics and the correct identification of the optimum vehicle operating boundaries in completely different use scenarios. Since a vehicle is a strongly nonlinear system mainly because of tyres behaviour, the methodology able to adequately determine the stability region becomes crucial. Starting from a specific literature survey, this work aims to investigate control-oriented approaches, employing the local stability criteria method, able to determine stability regions within the system phase-plane potentially adoptable in a computationally-efficient vehicle onboard logic. The techniques presented and the sensitivity analyses conducted highlight which should be the research directions in this field to remove several not-negligible but yet present assumptions in the literature.