Modeling and control of steering system of heavy vehicles for automated highway systems

This work presents modeling, analysis, and controller design of the steering subsystem of heavy vehicles as a subsystem of vehicle lateral control system for the automated highway systems. A physical model of the steering subsystem is derived where the hydraulic power assist unit is modeled as a family of static nonlinear boost curves. Based on open-loop frequency tests and analysis of the physical model structure and its dynamical characteristics, a nominal second order linear model of the steering subsystem is obtained. Then, a linear robust loop-shaping controller is designed to provide a good tracking performance of the closed-loop dynamics of the steering subsystem for varying gain cross over frequencies which is a result of the nonlinear characteristics of the hydraulic power assist. The controller has been successfully incorporated as an inner-loop controller into the nested lateral control architecture for autonomous driving and its efficacy has been demonstrated experimentally.