Mr. Gordan Kongue

Phd Candidate, IP Paris

Formalizing Vehicle Stability Envelopes

This talk will introduce the concept of a Vehicle Stability Envelope, conceived as the maximal dynamically admissible command set consistent with stability, safety, and physical feasibility. Rather than prescribing stability through local criteria or heuristic margins, we construct a positively invariant, bounded, connected, and compact subset of the state–input space within which all realizable control actions preserve closed-loop stability under bounded uncertainties and exogenous disturbances. By construction, for every state belonging to this set, there exists at least one admissible control action that steers the system within the envelope and guarantees that it remains therein for all subsequent steps. The central thesis is epistemological as much as technical: stability is not merely enforced but embedded in the geometry of admissible commands. The envelope characterizes the intrinsic control authority of the vehicle as determined by its configuration, actuator architecture, and dynamical signature. It evolves online through data-driven set updates, rendering it adaptive to changing mass distribution, tire characteristics, and environmental conditions.

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