Statistical data have reported that tire blowout is the most frequent cause of vehicle breakdowns on highways. To reduce secondary accidents caused by tire blowouts, the development of autonomous driving technologies for four-wheeled vehicles has attracted increasing attention. In this study, we propose a control system design method based on nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) for a nonlinear vehicle model that accounts for lateral slip during a tire blowout. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a type of optimal feedback control that optimizes control performance over a finite prediction horizon, where the performance index includes both a moving initial time and a moving terminal time. NMPC is recognized as one of the most successful control methodologies, because it enables optimization of control performance while accounting for system nonlinearities and constraints. Therefore, this study aims to develop NMPC method for trajectory tracking with obstacle avoidance of nonlinear vehicle dynamics, and to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through numerical simulations.
Kobayashi et al. (Wed,) studied this question.