A Differentiable Chassis Safety Layer for Intelligent Vehicle Motion Control

Overview & Synopsis

Learning-based vehicle motion control requires coordination between diverse task objectives and state-dependent chassis safety constraints. Conventional cascaded architectures may compromise task performance when safety filters modify nominal commands independently of policy learning. This article proposes a differentiable chassis safety layer that modularly integrates task-oriented control with explicit physical constraints. Actuator limits, individual-tire force constraints, and vehicle handling envelopes are incorporated into sequential quadratic programs. Each projected command propagates the predicted vehicle dynamics and updates subsequent constraints, enabling temporal gradient coupling through implicit differentiation. A two-stage learning strategy combines expert imitation with risk-guided supervision and conditional intervention guidance to coordinate nominal control decisions with chassis safety constraints. Closed-loop evaluations under unseen scenarios, emergency maneuvers, and ablation studies demonstrate that the proposed method improves safety-performance coordination and exploits vehicle dynamic potential while maintaining handling stability.