Fuzzy virtual impedance controller in human-vehicle interaction

In the previous studies mechanical impedance has become well implement in the field of human-machine interaction. However, in human-vehicle interaction there is a variant environment when driving a vehicle, thus apart from interacting with human, impedance controller is needed to adapt to the variant environment. But for mechanical impedance as being a second order mass-viscosity-stiffness model with fixed parameters, it is difficult to adapt to variational constraints. In this paper, a fuzzy virtual impedance of vehicle is studied. Fuzzy virtual impedance is based on fuzzy instruction that is a fuzzy set of control instruction candidates with reasoning of Takagi-Sugeno(T-S) fuzzy model. The achieved impedance characteristics depend on the rules of T-S fuzzy model. A human-vehicle interaction experiment was preformed to demonstrate the practical application of the proposed impedance and verify the adaptability to variational constraints.