A steer-by-wire (SbW) system, also known as a next-generation steering system, is one of the core elements of autonomous driving technology. Navigating a SbW system road vehicle in varying driving conditions requires an adaptive and robust control scheme to effectively compensate for the uncertain parameter variations and external disturbances. Therefore, this article proposed an adaptive global fast sliding mode control (AGFSMC) for SbW system vehicles with unknown steering parameters. First, the cooperative adaptive sliding mode observer (ASMO) and Kalman filter (KF) are established to simultaneously estimate the vehicle states and cornering stiffness coefficients. Second, based on the best set of estimated dynamics, the AGFSMC is designed to stabilize the impact of nonlinear tire-road disturbance forces and at the same time to estimate the uncertain SbW system parameters. Due to the robust nature of the proposed scheme, it can not only handle the tire–road variation, but also intelligently adapts to the different driving conditions and ensures that the tracking error and the sliding surface converge asymptotically to zero in a finite time. Finally, simulation results and comparative study with other control techniques validate the excellent performance of the proposed scheme.

Navigating a robot in a dynamic environment is a challenging task, especially when the behavior of other agents such as pedestrians, is only partially predictable. Also, the kinodynamic constraints on robot motion add an extra challenge. This paper proposes a novel navigational strategy for collision avoidance of a kinodynamically constrained robot from multiple moving passive agents with partially predictable behavior. Specifically, this paper presents a new approach to identify the set of control inputs to the robot, named control obstacle, which leads it towards a collision with a passive agent moving along an arbitrary path. The proposed method is developed by generalizing the concept of nonlinear velocity obstacle (NLVO), which is used to avoid collision with a passive agent, and takes into account the kinodynamic constraints on robot motion. Further, it formulates the navigational problem as an optimization problem, which allows the robot to make a safe decision in the presence of various sources of unmodelled uncertainties. Finally, the performance of the algorithm is evaluated for different parameters and is compared to existing velocity obstacle-based approaches. The simulated experiments show the excellent performance of the proposed approach in term of computation time and success rate.