Risk-managed safety screening via stability-constrained reachability tubes for vehicle handling
Near-limit emergency maneuvers are dominated by nonlinear tire saturation and stability constraints, calling for a short-horizon handling envelope that can be queried online. We formulate a stability-constrained finite-time reachability tube for a planar single-track vehicle with Magic-Formula tires. For a discretized primitive library and an environment channel [Formula: see text], where μ denotes tire-road friction, s road grade, and w a crosswind surrogate, the tube [Formula: see text] aggregates all states that remain dynamically admissible and reachable for [Formula: see text]. We prove compactness and, under a local robustness-of-admissibility condition, a Hausdorff-continuity result, and derive sampling-complexity scaling with time resolution, geometric tolerance, and environment dimension. Offline, we construct tube slices using analytic stability screening and nonconvex α-shape reconstruction in a normalized feature space, enabling fast membership queries for online feasibility screening. The main high-fidelity benchmark is carried out on the nominal flat-road/no-wind slice [Formula: see text] with friction-only variation; the Supplementary Information extends the study to fixed grade-only, wind-only, and combined off-nominal slices, and includes a stratified CarSim spot-check on the separated grade-only and wind-only cases. On an extreme-scenario benchmark, the tube screen provides a conservative triage gate and deployment-oriented diagnostics, including conflict-time statistics, risk-coverage frontiers, baseline comparisons, and guard-band sensitivity. The approach bridges reachability analysis and reliability-facing safety screening for near-limit vehicle operation.
Authors
- Yier Lin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8197-0516)
- Jianzheng Liu
- Jinzhe Yang
- Kai Tian
- Junxia Zhang
Institutions
- Tianjin University of Science and Technology (CN)
- Tianjin Special Equipment Supervision and Inspection Technology Research Institute (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Scientific Reports
- Published
- 2026-05-18
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-51896-y
- Primary Topic
- Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00