Development of Robust H-Infinity Steering Control System for Autonomous Vehicles

Undoubtedly one of the most significant security systems for today’s autonomous ground vehicles is their steering system. A commonly used approach for control purposes in the automotive industry is the steering-by-wire concept. Despite its simplicity, this method is rather new and several concerns may arise regarding external loads arising from the tire-ground contact patch. This paper discusses the robust controller design of an electric steering-by-wire system taking into account multiple sources of uncertainty. In order to achieve robust performance, an H_∞ controller was selected for the task. This allows excellent disturbance rejection while requiring low computational needs. The design is verified using simulations and the final verification phase includes testing on the RECAR autonomous vehicle by utilizing rapid prototyping and hardware-in-the-loop tools.