A Virtual Development Approach Using Advanced HiL Steering Bench

Virtual methods in vehicle development processes are constantly getting a greater role over time. The benefits of such methods are lower the costs, speed up the process, explore a wider design space and increase the level of design detail before getting into physical prototypes; in recent years such methods are covering more and more the human perception and how the driver feels the vehicle. The case study presented in this paper is about the tuning of an EPS using Hardware-in-the-Loop methods to carry on the power steering development in a simulator using a steering HiL test-rig driven by human test-drivers. The work starts by analyzing the behavior of a production steering system of the same manufacturer using standard open loop maneuvers and track driving to collect objective and subjective metrics to assess the steering behavior. This phase has a strong importance in order to understand which objective parameters impact in certain specific subjective score. After first validation and decoding phase, the same metrics are then used to tune the EPS in development. The proposed development process allows to greatly reduce costs and time required to tune a steering system and has the side benefit to enhance the steering feeling of the driving simulator thanks to a deeper understanding of the developed steering system. Thanks to these improvements, the proposed process significantly contributes to the current SoA by showcasing new frontiers for virtual methods for vehicle development.