Investigation of the conflict between the driver and a vehicle steering assist controller

A serial vehicle steering assist controller is designed using variable structure model reference adaptive control. Due to the variation in human driver behavior, the stability of the compensated system is not guaranteed and conflict between the driver and the steering assist controller may exist. A model predictive control based driver model is employed to represent the variation in driver intention, and the conflict is observed in computer simulations. A simple decision making algorithm is implemented as a preliminary attempt, and the conflict situations are successfully avoided when the driver model is a performant steering controller. Future work of this research includes the revision of the decision making algorithm to incorporate the driver state and the transitions of controller states using fuzzy logics.