Research on Steering-Following System of Intelligent Vehicle-in-the-Loop Testbed

Intelligent Vehicle (IV) is expected to revolutionize the way vehicles operating in the next few decades. The most commonly used method to test the functionality of the IV is to use the IV testbed for operable and economic reasons. However, the traditional testbed only has the ability to test the longitudinal movement and is not capable of studying the lateral movement of the IV, which extremely restricts the developments of the IV testing technologies (e.g., IV lane-keeping and lane-changing testing). To this end, this paper presents a novel steering-following system (SFS) for the intelligent vehicle-in-the-loop (VIL) testbed. The SFS is able to obtain the real-time steering angle differences between the front wheels and the drum roller by two-pair laser distance sensors equipped on the testbed. Then the value and changing rate of the obtained real-time steering angle difference are set as the inputs of a fuzzy sliding mode control (FSMC) algorithm. The outputs of the FSMC algorithm are used to control the operation of the servo motors. With that, the testbed accurately tracks the steering maneuver of the IV at any time. A simulation-based experiment and a VIL-based experiment show that the designed SFS with the FSMC algorithm is able to provide accurate and stable tracking results for the IV steering maneuvers under different scenarios.