Longitudinal-lateral coupling control and global sensitivity analysis method for intelligent vehicles under heterogeneous disturbances

Abstract Intelligent vehicles motion control system is a kind of nonlinear system with many heterogeneous disturbances such as modeling inaccuracies, model coupling, parameters perturbation, speed fluctuation and external environmental disturbance. This paper accordingly proposes a nonlinear longitudinal-lateral coupling model predictive control method. Firstly, to effectively describe the inherent nonlinearity and coupling of the vehicle dynamic model, an approximate nonlinear longitudinal-lateral coupling model with a paradigm bounded uncertainty is established using linear fractional transformation formulation. Secondly, a final-value theorem-based constrained feedforward compensation strategy and a speed compensation are designed to obtain the longitudinal-lateral coupling control law, which can effectively handle heterogeneous disturbances of the system. Thirdly, a Sobol-based global sensitivity analysis method is designed to analyse and quantify the extent to which different disturbances affect the control performance of the system. Finally, the recursive feasibility of the closed-loop system is analysed and system asymptotic stability is proved through Lyapunov theorem. The simulation results of Carsim-Simulink and the statistical comparison analysis show the superiority of the proposed controller, which can effectively ensure the stability margin and has good tracking accuracy, robustness. Further, real-vehicle experimental results also show good accuracy and real-time performance.