Vehicle speed control by a robotic driver considering time delay and parametric variations

Robotic drivers are used in vehicle performance tests such as fuel consumption. The test vehicle is driven on the dynamometer for driving test cycles with defined time and speed. To compare fuel consumption of various vehicles appropriately, better control performance is necessary to maintain the target vehicle speed. However, it is difficult to realize better control performance because a vehicle is a controlled system with a dead time and a large model error. In this paper, we designed a control system that realizes better control performance for the controlled system with a dead time and a large model error. First, we built the driver model from vehicle characteristics. We then designed a control system that permits the modeling error. The speed control performance of the proposed control system was confirmed by vehicle running tests with robotic driver.