Almost kinematic reducibility of a car model with small lateral slip angle for control design

Nowadays there exist a vast literature on the lateral control of cars with different objectives ranging from stability control to autonomous driving on intelligent highways or virtual prototypes in CAE tools. The synthesis of the proposed controllers is based, in most papers, on standard models of the vehicle lateral dynamics such as the one-track model described in [2]. The art of the control engineer has always been the choice of the right model for control design. Here, we describe the properties of a different model of the vehicle in terms of a recently introduced concept of kinematic reducibility. We claim that this model is best for control design and we illustrate the architecture of a controller previously developed by the authors. Finally, we show the controller behaviour in various simulations of aggressive maneuvers.