This book describes methods used to analyze and understand vehicle behavior, to help the driver to avoid lane departures, rollover or jackknifing risks, to improve passenger comfort through suspension control and to estimate a safety speed and trajectory.

Vehicles are complex mechanical systems with strong nonlinear characteristics and which can present some uncertainties due to their dynamic parameters such as masses, inertias, suspension springs, tires side slip coefficients, etc. A vehicle is composed of many parts, namely the unsprung mass, the sprung mass, the suspension which makes the link between these two masses and therefore ensures passenger comfort, and also the pneumatic which absorbs the energy coming from the road and ensures contact between the vehicle and the road. In addition to its complexity and the presence of many nonlinearities and uncertainties, the presence of some external perturbations, such as the wind and the road inputs with its own characteristics (radius of curvature, longitudinal and lateral slop, road profile and skid resistance) can cause risks not only to the vehicle but also to passengers and other road users.Many methods have been developed in order to understand the behavior of a vehicle, control it and assist the driver in order to avoid possible lane departures, rollover or jackknifing risks, to ensure a better passenger comfort by means of a suspension control and/or to estimate a safety speed and trajectory. The present book is an attempt to show how the sliding mode based observation, uncertainties identification and parameter estimation may be applied in the control of vehicle dynamics as well as for parameter and perturbations estimation. This book is the first of long series of books in the field of variable structure system in automotive application. Some other results and tools will be proposed and explained in the next publications.

From the reviews:“This book discusses the implementation of sliding mode observers in the analysis and identification of vehicle dynamics after presenting some of the most recently developed sliding mode observers and the vehicle dynamical models. … This is a good book for those who wish to learn the sliding model observer and/or vehicle dynamics and it is also good for those who are going to start research on vehicle control with sliding mode.” (Yaodong Pan, Mathematical Reviews, January, 2013)