Control laws for a distributed traction and steering system

The paper deals with a vehicle where each front wheel is equipped with its own apparatus of traction and steering. Aim of the paper is to study the control laws of the steering maneuver; to this end an appropriate model of the vehicle is firstly worked out. Then two models for the steering maneuver, namely for the kinematic and the dynamic steering, are developed. Differently from the kinematic steering that holds only for low speed or large cornering radius, the dynamic model reproduces the behavior of a real vehicle more accurately. Afterwards a suitable control law of the steering maneuver is synthesized for both the models and the effectiveness of the control law is proved by simulation. As a case study, a minicar available at the laboratory is considered.