Haptic tele-driving design of vehicle steering control system with communication delay under complicated driving and road conditions

In this paper, stabilization of tele-driving system in presence of communication time delay is studied using a 103 DOF vehicle model generated in ADAMS/Car Software. The purpose of this study is achieving a real sense of driving for tele-driving system in virtual environment under complicated driving and road conditions. To this aim, the performance of the various control architectures, in terms of position and force tracking, are investigated. Hence, the two-channel architecture is chosen as the most appropriate scheme to implement the haptic control system for the vehicle steering mechanism. In this paper, we designed an effective haptic feedback control for vehicle steering mechanism in the tele-driving system so that a command can be exerted to steering wheel by the human operator, which passes through the communication channels and will be applied to unmanned vehicle steering system. It is verified that an appropriate coordination performance under the human input can be obtained with the proposed control framework. To overcome the possible instability problem associated with existence of time-delay in communication channels, wave variables and their corrections are effectively embedded into the control system. Finally, the proposed bilateral tele-driving control on a rough 3D road surface at complicated driving and road conditions in the presence of time-delay are examined comprehensively.