Real-time simulation of a vehicle drivetrain controlled through CAN using a robust MPC strategy

This paper proposes a real-time implementation of a networked one step ahead robust predictive controller designed to damp driveline oscillations, which is crucial in improving driveability and passenger comfort, while compensating the time-varying delays that appear due to sending the control commands and the measurements from the sensors through Controller Area Network (CAN). Firstly, the designed real-time structure integrated with CAN test-bench is described and then the model of the drivetrain is derived. Secondly, considering that the CAN-induced time-varying delays are bounded, a method to model their effects as disturbances is proposed. Then, a robust one step ahead predictive controller based on flexible control Lyapunov functions is designed, which explicitly takes into account the bounds of the disturbances caused by time-varying delays and guarantees also the input-to-state stability of the system in a non-conservative way. The proposed control scheme is tested using the designed test-bench and the experiments based on realistic scenarios illustrate its performances.