QFT control applied to a Drive by Wire (DBW) system

Abstract

Tradionally, the throttle valve positioning was performed mechanically by means of a steel cable. Nowadays at the embedded system stage, an electromechanical system named as Drive by Wire (DBW) substitutes the direct positioning. The DBW is controlled by the vehicle Engine Control Unit (ECU) and is responsible to adjust the mass air flow delivered to the engine and to control the idle engine rotation. The throttle valve control is somehow a challenging task because of nonlinear phenomena caused by the spring and the gearbox. The present work aims to design a robust parametric control for a DBW system, using a plant model identified numerically at different operations points. The results show that the controller is able to deal with the nonlinear phenomena providing a reasonable performance with no steady state error and a consistent setting time.