Unified Chassis Control: A Model-Free Approach

This paper investigates a model-free unified chassis controller (UCC) for simultaneous regulation of vehicle side-slip angle, yaw rate, and roll angle during abrupt maneuvers. The proposed strategy combines iPD-based model-free controllers with a control allocation architecture and is evaluated in a MATLAB/Simulink^®-CarSim^® co-simulation environment under a sine-with-dwell maneuver for three road friction conditions. The comparison includes the open-loop vehicle, the built-in CarSim^® ESC baseline, a fixed-parameter 2PID+fuzzy controller, and a gain-scheduled LQR benchmark. No benchmark minimizes every nominal metric at all friction levels. However, the proposed controller provides the most consistent robustness across conditions. It is the only strategy that completes the low-friction case while keeping lateral and roll responses bounded and meaningful, whereas the other baselines either lose practical stability before the end of the maneuver or exhibit unacceptable state excursions. This robustness is associated with a more active realized brake pressure pattern, while the anti-roll torque remains within moderate bounds. These findings indicate that the proposed MFC-based UCC offers a favorable compromise between regulation quality, practical closed-loop stability, and actuator demand under friction variations.