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Vehicle Handling performance depends on many parameters. One of the most important parameters is the dynamic behavior of the steering system. However, steering system had been enhanced thoroughly over the past decade where Active Front Steering (AFS) is now present and other system as Active Independent Front Steering (AIFS) is currently in the research phase. Actually, AFS system adopt the front wheels’ angles base on the actual input steering angle from the driver according to vehicle handling dynamics performance. While, the AIFS controls the angle of each front wheel individually to avoid reaching the saturation limits of any of the front wheels’ adhesion. In this paper modeling and analysis of an AIFS is presented with Tire Work Load (TWL) based controller. Magic Formula tire model is implemented to represent the tire in lateral slip condition.

In this work, a theoretical investigation of four-wheel steering (or shortly 4WS) system is presented using a linear model to simulate vehicle handling characteristics. This model incorporates driver';s operation. The simulation concerns the vehicle in straight running while the vehicle is subjected to side wind excitation. Limitations of measurements in practice are supporting the implementation of limited state feedback systems instead of those which are based on full state feedback information. Therefore, the well known Kalman filter algorithm is used in this work to design a practical 4WS control strategy. This practical system uses only feedback signals of lateral acceleration and front steering angle to obtain the control law. Measurement noise is taken into account and results are generated to obtain the step response of the outputs of interest.

This work presents a theoretical study on a linear 3-DOF vehicle handling model which, incorporates driver's operation and vehicle suspension derivatives. The model is constructed to investigate the performance of vehicles with conventional front steering system and vehicles with actively controlled front wheel steering system as well. The control strategy of the Active Front Steering (AFS) control is based on the optimal control theory using LQR technique. The vehicle model excitation is a simulation of the aerodynamic forces and moments generated on a passenger car when overtaking a truck. Results are showing a comparison between the performance of the vehicle with conventional steering system and the vehicle with Active Front Steering (AFS) system. A significant improvement with the AFS optimal system is achieved in the vehicle response especially for lateral deviation error.

In this work, the active front steering control is studied using linear three degrees of freedom handling model incorporating the driver’s operation model and vehicle suspension derivatives. The active steering control strategy is based on the optimal control theory. In this design, the active front steering angle is determined based on minimizing all model state variables and full state feedback gains. The results are generated when the model is excited by random wind excitation, which was modeled as quasi-static approach with statistical properties taken from previous work, and presented in frequency domain as power spectral density as well as root mean square values in tables. Significant improvements are achieved for the vehicle handling characteristics using active front steering control in comparison with active four wheel steering and conventional two wheel steering.