Dynamics and Optimal Control of Road Vehicles

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.

1 - History of Road Vehicles
2 - Topics in Mechanics
3 - Tyres
4 - Precursor Vehicle Modelling
5 - Whipple Bicycle
6 - Ride Dynamics
7 - Advanced Vehicle Modelling
8 - Optimal Control
9 - Vehicular Optimal Control

David J.N. Limebeer is Professor of Control Engineering at the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford. He was formerly Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London. He has been carrying out research and consultancy in the field of vehicle dynamics and optimal control of road vehicles since the late 1990s. He is also the author of the book "Linear Optimal Control" (1995; 2017). Matteo Massaro is Associate Professor of Applied Mechanics at the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Padova, IT. He carried out research and consultancy in the fields of vehicle and tyre dynamics, optimal control of road vehicles, motorcycle simulators and driver/rider-vehicle interactions since the mid 2000s.