Search Results

The past five years have seen significant research into autonomous vehicles that employ a by-wire steering rack actuator and no steering wheel. There is a clear synergy between these advancements and the parallel development of complete Steer-by-Wire systems for human-operated passenger vehicle applications. Steer-by-Wire architectures presented thus far in the literature require multiple layers of electrical and/or mechanical redundancy to achieve the safety goals. Unfortunately, this level of redundancy makes it difficult to simultaneously achieve three key manufacturer imperatives: safety, reliability, and cost. Hindered by these challenges, as of 2020 only one production car platform employs a Steer-by-Wire system. This paper presents a Steer-by-Wire architectural solution featuring fail-operational steering control architected with the objective of achieving all system safety, reliability, and cost goals.

Complex chassis systems operate in various environments such as low-mu surfaces and highly dynamic maneuvers. The existing metrics for lateral motion hazard by Neukum [13] and Amberkar [17] have been developed and correlated to driver behavior against disturbances on straight line driving on a dry surface, but do not cover low-mu surfaces and dynamic driving scenarios which include both linear and nonlinear region of vehicle operation. As a result, an improved methodology for evaluating vehicle yaw dynamics is needed for safety analysis. Vehicle yaw dynamics safety analysis is a methodical evaluation of the overall vehicle controllability with respect to its yaw motion and change of handling characteristic.