A Minimally Configured Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulator of Electrical Power Steering System for Human Driver Interaction on Crosswind Effect

The advancement of electrical power steering system (EPSS) in a vehicle system has moved forward for decades. However, before the era of the complete autonomous vehicles comes, many investigations are still underway to improve EPSS characteristics and performance for the human driver interactions, while conducting both actual field tests and indoor HILS. Meanwhile, to replace the costly and time-consuming field tests, the indoor EPSS based HILS has been frequently used as an alternative to explore the characteristics of an actual EPSS and mimic the steering reaction torque created by a real car. However, the recent EPSS Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulators become computationally expensive, complicated as well as costly by integrating several software(s) with the hardware(s). This might be extravagant for those who wish to practically implement those systems within a limited budget. Therefore, we proposed a compact, cost-effective and minimum hardware-based EPSS HIL simulator interacting with a human driver. Specifically, the dynamic models of 3-D.O.F vehicle and EPSS are constructed on the virtual environment (MATLAB/Simulink), and the dynamic behavior of EPSS, generated by those virtual models, has been mimicked via an actual motor and delivered to actual test participants operating the simulator. The effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed simulator in conjunction with a human driver have been compared with the simulation results of certified Carsim software. In addition, for our future studies, the dynamic responses of the vehicle body and EPSS under the effect of cross-wind have been explored based on the proposed simulator and, the average of human driver's torque to compensate for the effect has been finally addressed.