Steering Control Compensation of Accelerating Vehicle Motion

Abstract

Abstract : A dangerous and common situation during highway automotive use is the emergency turning/braking (ETB) maneuver. An ETB maneuver is defined by full application of the brakes combined with a significant steering input from the driver. To date, there has been no known development of a dedicated driver assistance controller for this common situation. The proposed ETB controller assists the driver in maintaining control over the vehicle during the ETB maneuver. The ETB controller and similar vehicle subsystem development is limited as a result of the high material cost and space intensiveness of full-size vehicle testing. Normally, physical testing of automotive components is cost and space prohibitive at small research facilities. The use of scale-model vehicle testing in automotive engineering is a recent innovation and, therefore, the development of a scale-model platform is a significant contribution to this field. The scale-model platform components include a treadmill, scale-model vehicle assembled from kit, vision system, desktop computer, and sensor suite. The treadmill and scale-model vehicle simulate the road and vehicle, respectively, while the camera system provides position and orientation data to the vehicle controllers. Utilizing sensor data, the computer maintains the vehicle's position on the treadmill in a closed-loop system, while the treadmill speed controller functions in a parallel open loop. A mathematical model of a vehicle has been developed and a scale-model vehicle platform constructed. The ETB controller prototype has been designed using Linear Quadratic optimal control methods and simulated and will assist the driver in controlling the vehicle during the ETB maneuver.