  The development of control techniques to maintain vehicle stability under
possible loss-of-control scenarios is essential to the safe deployment of
autonomous ground vehicles in public scenarios. In this paper, we propose a
tube-based guaranteed cost model predictive controller for autonomous vehicles
able to avoid front and rear tire saturation and to track a provided reference
trajectory up to the limits of handling of the vehicle. Such an approach
ensures the vehicle will remain within its safe operational envelope;
therefore, guaranteeing both stability and performance of the vehicle,
including highly dynamic maneuvers that may be necessary for emergency
conditions. We also propose a new conservative approximation of the nonlinear
vehicle dynamics to a linear system subject to norm bounded multiplicative
uncertainties and a new maximal robust controllable invariant set for vehicle
dynamics. It consists of a larger feasible state-space region when compared to
previously proposed invariant sets. Finally, we present both simulation and
in-vehicle results of the performance of the proposed approach.
