An overriding controller for vehicle lateral control system

Driver assistance systems are expected to reduce the possibility of accidents caused by impaired or reckless driving. However, the current designs employed in some luxury cars are not entirely reliable and may even lead to more distraction of the driver. This paper presents the idea of an overriding controller for lateral control of a vehicle in a driver assistance system. In the proposed system, when the driver turns the steering wheel, the steer signal goes to a controller instead of the steering column of the car. The output of the controller is the actual value of steer signal which acts on the wheels. Since the driver might be in an abnormal situation while driving (due to drowsiness, fatigue, drunkenness, etc.), a second control structure is also presented in which the error signal, measured by exact sensors, is subtracted from the signal coming from the driver and resulting signal goes to the controller. Simulation results show the superiority of the proposed algorithms to the conventional driving. The stability robustness of the proposed control structures is shown using both structured singular value (μ) analysis and Monte-Carlo simulations.