Dynamics and Optimal Control of Road Vehicles

Book excerpt: Dynamics and Optimal Control of Road Vehicles uniquely offers a unified treatment of tyre, car and motorcycle dynamics, and the application of nonlinear optimal control to vehicle-related problems within a single book. This is a comprehensive and accessible text that emphasises the theoretical aspects of vehicular modelling and control. The book focuses on two major elements. The first is classical mechanics and its use in building vehicle and tyre dynamics models. The second focus is nonlinear optimal control, which is used to solve a range of minimum-time and minimum-fuel, as well as track curvature reconstruction problems. As is known classically, all of this material is bound together by the calculus of variations and stationary principles. The treatment of this material is supplemented with a number of examples that were designed to highlight obscurities and subtleties in the theory.