Artificial Steering Feel for Teleoperated Road Vehicle with Disturbance Observer

Teleoperated driving is regarded as an alternative technology to fully autonomous driving. Drivers in teleoperated driving need haptic feedback to control the remote vehicle. To provide driver steering feel, this paper proposes an artificial steering feel model for teleoperated driving. During the dynamics modeling, the structure of teleoperated steering system (TSS) is separated as a local steering module and a remote steering actuation module. The handwheel torque generating steering feel in the local steering module consists of two parts: aligning torque and equivalent friction torque. Aligning torque is obtained by estimating rack force utilizing an extended disturbance observer. To achieve the customizable steering feel, a mathematical model with weighting function is introduced. Objective evaluation method is adopted to evaluate the performance of the designed steering feel and decide the variable parameter values of the model. Hardware-in-the-loop experiments are conducted on a self-designed driving simulator. By comparing with the conventional steering system, the experiment results indicate that the proposed model can be tuned to have the desired steering feel for teleoperated road vehicles.