Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/asjc.007 ADAPTIVE CONTROL APPROACH TOUNCERTAIN LONGITUDINAL TIRE SLIP IN TRACTIONCONTROLOF VEHICLES

This paper addresses the longitudinal traction control problem of vehi-cles. A nonlinear control law at the torque level is shown to cope with the unknown tyre reaction force. From a physical consideration of a vehicle, a decoupling controller design is considered, which enables us to make the con-troller design straightforward. A parameter estimator is introduced to adaptive control of the system with uncertain frictional coefficient. The proposed con-troller indicates the better control performance than that of a non-adaptive or a conventional PI controller as evaluated in numerical simulation. Key Words: Traction control, adaptive control, nonlinear system, vehicle. I