Coordination of the Authority between the Vehicle Driver and a Steering Assist Controller

Driver steering control performance varies with time during the vehicle driving course. A serial vehicle steering assist controller is designed to provide steering correction that can compensate the difference between the current driver and an “idealized” driver model. Using variable structure model reference adaptive control, a robust adaptive controller for lane keeping assist is developed. To reduce the complexity in control computations, a simplified version of the robust adaptive steering assist controller is also developed. Due to the significant variations in human driver behaviour, the stability of the compensated system is not guaranteed and conflict between the driver and the steering assist controller exist. A model predictive control based driver model and a dual-loop structure driver model are employed to represent the variations in driver intention, and the conflict between the controller and the driver is observed from computer simulations. A simple decision making algorithm is implemented and the conflict situations are successfully avoided for different driver behaviour modes and driving scenarios. Future work of this research will focus on implementing the designed controller on a driving simulator and experiments with human drivers on the driving simulator. Key-Words: vehicle steering assist, driver interaction