The goal of this thesis is to propose steering support systems that can reduce the driver’s control effort, mental load and promote safety. The driver dictates the vehicle’s motion and the support should centralize him/her in the control loop; thus our design philosophy is to increase driver’s responsibility and support him/her in the sense of information rather than automation. Incarnating such an abstract theme into a concrete problem which can be methodologically solved in terms of engineering science, necessitates a milestone-oriented work approach. Thus, the path to realize this development is to systematically sub-divide the concept into distinct milestones allowing to embody this high-level idea into objectively assessed steering interfaces. This milestone-oriented approach can be divided into seven steps: i) Study the state-of-the-art driver support systems and identify the potential space for improvement. ii) Develop the means (driving simulators, vehicular instrumentation and data analysis methods) to aid the driver steering support interface research. iii) Study the driver steering interface without any support. iv) Utilize the gathered knowledge to develop steering support interfaces, assess them in simulation level, v) and adapt the simulation support controllers into real vehicles and test them. vi) Evaluate the influence of the support interface with the real vehicle results. vii) Based upon the assessment, make a road-map for the commercial implementation of the support interface; if it is fruitful promote its further development with ultimate goal the adoption into production vehicles. he aforementioned milestone-oriented approach has been followed for the development of the driver steering support interfaces presented in this thesis. The current summary substantiates the milestones into the distinct goal addressed in Chapters 2 — 7. The goal to develop the hardware and performance evaluation-control methods in order to engineer realistic haptic cues on the steering wheel of our driving simulator is addressed in Chapter 2. A relatively low-cost solution for hardware is deployed, consisting of a velocity-controlled three-phase brushless servomotor, whose high bandwidth control allows for a realistic representation of forces. To test the system, different inertia-spring-damper systems were simulated and evaluated in time and frequency domain. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting