Active Torque Control of Electric Power Steering System using Composite Nonlinear Feedback Control

Electric power steering (EPS) system plays an important role in assisting the driver to achieve better handling, steering feel and response in securing vehicle stability. In EPS control system, controlling the torque of the EPS motor is crucial where tracking of the robust command of motor angle to generate desired assist torque is very challenging. In this paper, a reference model is adopted to generate an ideal motor angle that can guarantee the desired performance and composite nonlinear feedback (CNF) control is applied to achieve a faster transient response in tracking the robust reference motor angle. The H2 state optimization is used to obtain the linear control parameters whereas Hooke-Jeeves auto-tuning algorithm is used to fine-tune the nonlinear control parameters to achieve the best transient performance. The proposed control strategy is validated with CarSim Software by interfacing Simulink model with CarSim full nonlinear vehicle model under different test procedures and compared to other controllers based on ITAE performance criteria.