Narrow Tilting Vehicles (NTV) are the convergence of a car and a motorcycle. One meter wide, these vehicles are designed for one or two people sitting the one in front the other. The idea behind the conception of NTV is the minimization of traffic congestion, energy consumption and pollutant emission. But because of their dimensions, these cars would have to lean into corners in order to compensate for the lateral acceleration and maintain their stability. The tilting should be automatic, and can be achieved by a tilting torque generated by a dedicated tilting actuator (DTC) or by modifying the steering angle (STC) or both (SDTC). In this thesis, we first propose a methodology for the design of an output feedback structured regulator, minimizing the H2 norm of a well-posed problem, built to optimize the lateral acceleration of the NTV, considering DTC and SDTC systems.The designed controllers, with the longitudinal velocity as a parameter, lead to the minimization of the tilting torque and of the lateral acceleration perceived by the driver, and have good performances as well as good robustness properties. Furthermore, the tuning methodology allows the comparison of a pure DTC solution and a mixed SDTC alternative. Compared to the literature, the originalities in this thesis are the direct control of the measured value of the lateral acceleration (instead of the tilting angle), and the anticipation of the tilt, thanks to the use of the steering angle and angular velocity. Furthermore, the SDTC solution allows to drive both the STC and DTC systems in a coordinated manner. The design strategies are based on a preliminary study of vehicle models, and a design model with 5DoF was developed. We demonstrated that the model has the nice property to be flat, and in the last section of the thesis, used this property to initiate the design of a non-linear robust controller, which can a priori lead to better performances in case of “large motions”.
