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Large variations load-to-curb weight ratios are linked to significant changes in parameters critical to control design for vehicle stability control system. Unique and highly customised vehicles, such as the lightweight solar car in this paper, are more susceptible to the impact of such variations when developing control methods. The purpose of this study is to study the influence of variation in loading conditions, the effect of ignoring changes in inertial parameters, and develop and compare a number of alternative vehicle stability control methods that can be applied to rear-wheel driven vehicles via in-wheel motors. In this paper a Sliding Mode Control (SMC) both nominal and when including uncertainty, Dynamic Curvature Control (DCC) and a Proportional–Integral Control (PI) strategies are compared to the baseline open-loop control case. Each controller is implemented through co-simulation via MATLAB® Simulink® and Siemens Amesim™ using a 15-DOF non-linear vehicle model. The results show that SMC achieves the best performance, whilst DCC tends to overshoot target conditions prior to settling, indicating that SMC is the preferred control strategy. It is also demonstrated that by ignoring the change in the inertial parameters in simulation environments can produce an incorrect translation of the control performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is motivated by an interesting recent result on antilock braking system (ABS) design using two-time scale (TTS)-based estimation. In this article, the basic method of TTS is extended to estimate not only the disturbances but also their derivatives, improving the accuracy of estimation by an order of magnitude. Further, the problem of ABS is extended to an eight-DOF vehicle model to include the effects of load transfer, steering dynamics, and actuator dynamics. Since analysis showed that the use of basic TTS to ABS design results in a poor transient in the estimation error dynamics, this article proposes a new formulation of the TTS method specifically for ABS. Two new ABS-specific sliding surfaces are proposed to compensate the actuator dynamics where the second sliding surface is proposed as an improvement over the first one. The stability, and convergence of estimation, and tracking errors are analyzed. The proposed methods are validated on MATLAB/Simulink, and CarSim platforms for a D-class sedan car. The results are also validated on an experimental ABS platform in the laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]