Driveaway and braking control of vehicles with manual transmission using a robotic driver

Robotic drivers are used to drive specific test cycles with arbitrary vehicles on roller dynamometers, e. g. for emission or lifetime tests. In this paper, control concepts for driveaway and braking of vehicles with manual transmission are presented. In contrast to existing approaches, the exact vehicle behaviour is unknown and the robotic driver was not trained on the specific vehicle. While braking control is not only necessary for highly accurate and reproducible following of given speed trajectories, but also for safety reasons to ensure stops whenever required, the driveaway control is - especially for vehicles with manual transmission - a critical manoeuvre, since engine stalling would make the cycle measurement useless, and ideally the fuel consumptions and therefore the emissions of pollutants should be minimal. Both controls were implemented on the robotic driver and emission test cycles have been driven with several real vehicles on a roller dynamometer. These experimental measurement results are presented.