Nonlinear adaptive tracking for ground vehicles in the presence of lateral wind disturbance and parameter variations

In this paper we design a dynamic controller for the attitude control of a ground vehicle. This controller ensures the tracking of desired references, in the presence of uncertainties in the parameters describing the tire-road friction coefficient and the lateral tire stiffness, and in the presence of external perturbations, such as lateral wind. It incorporates some dynamics reconstructing the lateral vehicle velocity, often not directly measured. Finally, the proposed control scheme allows the identification of the unknown parameters and, at the same time, of the disturbance due to the lateral wind acting on the vehicle. The performance of the dynamic controller is evaluated making use of CarSim considering a challenging double steer maneuver.