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Conventional steering system has a mechanical connection between the driver and the front tires of the vehicle, but in steer-by-wire system, there is no such a connection. Instead, actuators, positioned in the vehicle's front corners receive input from the control module and turn the front wheels accordingly. In steer-by-wire system, steering wheel is an important part that not only transfers driver's steering input to the controller but also provides a road feedback feeling to the driver's hand. Thus the reactive torque actuator, providing road feedback, plays an important role in steer-by-wire system. In conventional steer-by-wire-system, a motor was used as a reactive torque actuator. But using motor has some disadvantages such as an oscillatory feeling, and improper and potentially dangerous acceleration of the steering wheel by the motor when driver's hands are released from steering wheel abruptly.

A determination of the vehicle states and tire forces is critical to the stability of vehicle dynamic behavior and to designing automotive control systems. Researchers have studied estimation methods for the vehicle state vectors and tire forces. However, the accuracy of the estimation methods is closely related to the employed model. In this paper, tire lag dynamics is introduced in the model. Also application of estimation methods in order to improve the model accuracy is presented. The model is developed by using the global searching algorithm, a Genetic Algorithm, so that the model can be used in the nonlinear range. The extended Kalman filter and sliding mode observer theory are applied to estimate the vehicle state vectors and tire forces. The obtained results are compared with measurements and the outputs from the ADAMS full vehicle model. [15]

This paper presents the integrated chassis control(ICC) of four-wheel drive(4WD), electronic stability control(ESC), electronic control suspension(ECS), and active roll stabilizer(ARS) for limit handling. The ICC consists of three layers: 1) a supervisor determines target vehicle states; 2) upper level controller calculates generalized forces; 3) lower level controller, which is contributed in this paper, optimally allocates the generalized force to chassis modules. The lower level controller consists of two integrated parts, 1) longitudinal force control part (4WD/ESC) and 2) vertical force control part (ECS/ARS). The principal concept of both algorithms is optimally utilizing the capability of the each tire by monitoring tire saturation, with tire combined slip. By monitoring tire saturation, 4WD/ESC integrated system minimizes the sum of the tire saturation, and ECS/ARS integrated system minimizes the variance of the tire saturation.

Although tire forces are important as factors governing the behavior of a vehicle, current chassis control systems have used tire forces indirectly estimated. Hence, this research developed Intelligent Tire System (i-Tire) that can measure tire forces directly. This system used a deform gage and a surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensor, which are capable of passive radio communication. The performance of this developed system was tested with a tire test system (MTS Flat Trac) and a vehicle test.

The vehicle vibrations result from the exciting forces which are caused by air force, engine firing, tire mass unbalance, and tire uniformity. Especially, the shake and shimmy phenomena in the steering system are closely related to the vehicle vibration, the tire unbalance, and the tire uniformity. This paper presents the shimmy phenomenon due to the tire mass unbalance and the tire uniformity in order to investigate their effects.