Bilateral Control for Steer-by-Wire Vehicles

Steer-by-wire system, in which the conventional mechanical linkages between the steering wheel and the front wheel are removed, is suited to active steering control, improving vehicle stability, dynamics and maneuverability, as well as to autonomous steering control to assist the driver. Conventional controller for SBW system is designed by general feedback control method. However, driver can not exactly feel reaction torque generated from tire. And SBW system has another important problem about fault tolerant function. In this paper, we propose the bilateral control method based on the disturbance observer to improve steering feeling and the design of the sensor fault detection for SBW vehicles using sliding mode observer.