Vehicle Speed Control by a Robotic Driver Using an Internal Model Control Considering Parametric Variations of a Vehicle

Abstract

Robotic drivers are used in vehicle performance tests such as fuel consumption. A test vehicle is driven on a dynamometer for driving test cycles with a defined set of time and speed. To accurately compare fuel consumption of various vehicles, it is necessary to approach closer the target speed by better control performance. However, it is difficult to realize better control performance because a vehicle is a controlled system that has dead times and large model errors. In this paper, we designed a control system that realizes better control performance for the controlled system with dead times and large model errors. First, we built the driver model from the vehicle characteristics. We then designed a control system that permits the modeling error. The speed control performance of the proposed control system was confirmed by vehicle running tests with robotic driver.