A data-driven switching control approach for braking systems with constraints

Braking control is of paramount importance in guaranteeing driving safety and comfort, but it is a well-known challenging task, due to the highly nonlinear and road condition-dependent behavior of the vehicle. Existing braking controllers typically rely on accurate models of the vehicle dynamics and the vehicle–road interaction, which are quite difficult to be retrieved in practice. In the wake of the data-driven control paradigm, we propose a model-free and fully data-based braking control method. The architecture of our scheme is two-layered, featuring: an inner switching controller, directly designed from data to match a given closed-loop behavior, and an outer predictive reference governor, exploited to enforce constraints and possibly improve the overall braking performance. The effectiveness of the approach is shown in a simulation environment, by providing a sensitivity analysis to the main tuning knobs of the method.