Effect of Driving Force Control that Imitates the Function of Tire Lateral Force on Vehicle Dynamics

Various control methods have been proposed that aim to improve steering response, disturbance stability, and stabilize steering characteristics by distributing drive force to each wheel. Conventionally, controls have been constructed by combining those control methods and tuning gains for each control. However, such control design methods require a huge amount of man-hours, and besides, it is not clear which states are optimal. Therefore, in this paper, we first focused on the mechanism of tire lateral force. In general, vehicles can run stably against disturbances without implementing any feedback control. It was clarified that this is because the tire lateral force plays the role of a skyhook damper installed horizontally on the side of the vehicle. Therefore, we proposed a control method that brings out the maximum potential of tires based on the idea that tire longitudinal force should have the same function as tire lateral force.