Torque Overlay Based Robust Steering Wheel Angle Control for Lateral Control Using Backstepping Design

We propose a torque overlay based robust steering wheel angle control of electric power steering (EPS) for lateral control using backstepping design. The main contribution of this paper is that the proposed method is designed based on torque overlay and that the global uniform ultimate boundedness of the steering wheel angle tracking error is guaranteed using only steering wheel angle feedback with external disturbances. The key idea is to make the EPS dynamics be simplified. Then, the external disturbances, system function, and input gain uncertainty are regarded as a disturbance. An augmented observer is designed to estimate the full state and the disturbance. A nonlinear damping controller is developed via backstepping to suppress a position tracking error using input-to-state stability property. The proposed method uses only steering wheel angle feedback and nominal value of the input gain. The proposed method is simple to implement in real-time control and robust to the parameter uncertainties and the external disturbances. Since the proposed method is designed based on torque overlay as add-on type, it can be integrated with the conventional EPS system facilitating driver’s intervention.