Design projects on automotive controls - developing an automation lab for senior projects

This article describes several automotive controls-related senior design projects. In this project, a team of two students built several masked Simulink blocks comprising elements of a mean value engine model (MVEM) and assembled these blocks into a blockset in the Simulink block library. The MVEM blockset was used to create a virtual engine for which an idle-speed controller was designed. An interesting aspect of this project is that neither student was from the controls option, having taken only a compulsory introductory course on system dynamics and control. Yet, their first task after creating the MVEM engine model was to design a speed controller. The overall learning and design phases proceeded quickly due to the use of the sisotool graphical user interface (GU) in Matlab´s control system toolbox. The aim of this project was to create an HIL and human-in-the-loop driving simulator for testing vehicle dynamics control algorithms, examining the effect of a steer-by-wire actuator on vehicle dynamics control (VDC) performance, investigating driver-controller interaction, and eventually for driver modeling.