Active braking control system design: the D2-IBC approach

In modern road vehicles, active braking control systems are crucial elements to ensure safety and lateral stability. Unfortunately, the wheel slip dynamics is highly nonlinear and the on-line estimation of the road-tire conditions is still a challenging open research problem. These facts make it difficult to devise a braking control system that is reliable in any possible situation without being too conservative. In this paper, we propose the Data-Driven Inversion Based Control D2-IBC approach to overcome the above issues. The method relies on a two degrees of freedom architecture, with a linear controller and a nonlinear controller in parallel, both designed using only experimental data. The effectiveness of the proposed approach against state-of-the-art braking control is shown by means of an extensive simulation campaign. A validation test on a commercial full-fledged multibody simulator for two-wheeled vehicles is also provided.