An Adaptive Servo Control Strategy for Automotive Electronic Throttle and Experimental Validation

In order to achieve higher precise positioning of the throttle plate, an adaptive servo control strategy is presented for the electronic throttle control system. Compared with the existing results on the electronic throttle control schemes, in this paper, the throttle valve reference tracking controller comprises a proportional-integral-derivative-type feedback controller with adaptive gain parameters, an adaptive feedforward compensator, and adaptive nonlinearity compensators for friction, limp-home (LH), and backlash. The closed-loop controller is realized by only utilizing the information of the throttle valve position measured by a cheap potentiometer of low resolution. The theoretical proof and analysis show that the designed throttle control system can ensure fast and accurate reference tracking of the valve plate angle in the case of the uncertain parameters related to production deviations, variations of external conditions and aging, and the effects of transmission friction, return-spring LH, and gear backlash nonlinearity with uncertain parameters. Moreover, the capability of the adaptive controller to preserve the transient performance and accuracy is evaluated in both simulation and experiment.