An LOSM Speed Controller for Autonomous Commercial Vehicles Addressing Disturbance from Load and Slope Uncertainty

Autonomous commercial vehicles (ACVs) frequently encounter drastic variations in payload and complex road conditions during practical operations. Consequently, effectively suppressing external disturbances caused by payload and road slope uncertainties has become a critical challenge in enhancing the robustness of their low-level control systems. To address this issue, this paper proposes a sliding mode control (SMC) strategy based on Luenberger observer disturbance compensation (LOSM), aiming to simultaneously mitigate the adverse effects of these two uncertainties on the vehicle’s speed control performance. First, according to the driving characteristics of commercial vehicles, a full-condition longitudinal dynamic model encompassing uphill, downhill, and flat road scenarios is established. Second, by deeply integrating the Luenberger observer with sliding mode control theory, an active disturbance rejection LOSM speed controller is designed. Furthermore, the boundary conditions for the closed-loop system to achieve asymptotic stability are rigorously derived and proven using Lyapunov functions. Finally, to comprehensively verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, eight typical testing scenarios are constructed, and three benchmark algorithms—PI control, radial basis function adaptive sliding mode (RBFSM) control, and radial basis function backstepping sliding mode (RBFBSSM) control are introduced for comparative analysis. The validation results demonstrate that although all four methods can achieve speed tracking and suppress disturbances, the proposed LOSM strategy exhibits the optimal comprehensive performance across various scenarios. Specifically, its steady-state mean error is typically maintained below 2.5%, and it yields the minimum steady-state variance in the majority of scenarios. These results demonstrate that the designed LOSM method can significantly improve the precision and smoothness of ACVs’ speed control under the dual disturbances of unknown mass and road slope.