Active Brake Pedal Feedback Simulator Based on Electric Drive 2014-01-0325

Brake pedal feedback is important for driver's perception during the driving task as well as the pedal feel is an important factor in customer satisfaction. Therefore, a force emulation device is beneficial during the design phase to evaluate the pedal characteristic. Such a system is also needed for driving simulators. Usually, brake feedback systems in simulators rely on passive elements like springs and dampers to emulate the force. This does not allow the implementation of an arbitrary nonlinear pedal force characteristic. In this paper we propose an active pedal feedback simulator which can emulate an arbitrarily customizable and online adjustable brake pedal characteristic. The particular advantage of our pedal simulator is that the system can also emulate the exact pedal dynamics. This is advantageous compared to other active brake feedback simulators which rely on hydraulic actors. We show the mechatronic, electronic and software concept along with the required control framework and state observer. For verification the pedal simulator is parameterized with a dynamic pedal force model of a conventional middle sized car. We show that the experimental results prove accurate conformance of the measured pedal characteristics with respect to the given reference.