Improving vehicle dynamics by active rear wheel steering systems

This article presents two design strategies for an active rear wheel steering control system. The first method is a standard design procedure based on the well-known single track model. The aim of the feedback loop is to track a reference yaw rate in order to improve the handling behaviour. Unfortunately, a reasonable specification of the reference yaw rate proves to be a nontrivial task. A second approach avoids this drawback. The structure of the controller is regarded as a virtual mass-spring-damper system with adjustable parameters. Due to the high abstraction level of this method, the controller parameters can be tuned intuitively. Experiments with a prototype vehicle illustrate the effectiveness of the two proposed methodologies.