An Improved Control-Oriented Tire Model and Its Applications on Intelligent Vehicles

Tire characteristics highly influence vehicle dynamics and control performances. Although extensive research in tire models has been carried out, a general control-oriented tire model that could be implemented for all road environments has not been thoroughly explored. To deal with this, we propose a general control-oriented tire model considering the effect of friction coefficient, vertical force, and combined slip. Proposed tire model is in linear parameter varying (LPV) form, which facilitates stability analysis and controller design. The number of unknown parameters in proposed tire model is minimized and grey wolf optimizer (GWO) method is adopted to identify the unknown parameters. Comparisons between proposed tire model and tire test data from CarSim validate the accuracy of proposed model. Based on proposed tire model, lateral stability analysis and path-following controller design methods are introduced. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of proposed tire model compared with benchmark tire models.