Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

Automotive Control Systems Laboratory


A major effort for many years has involved the study of the two principal control facets of transportation systems: a microscopic aspect which relates to each individual vehicle, and a macroscopic aspect which relates to overall network operations. Laboratory work has included the development of sensors, the design and development of controllers for vehicle longitudinal and lateral control, and field evaluations of designs. Recent work involves active suspension control design, studies on hierarchy issues within individual vehicles coupling steering, braking, and suspension. Other work has focused on modeling and self-tuning control issues relative to Anti-Lock Brake systems for conventional and electronic brake systems. Laboratory hardware consisting of actual electronic brake hardware, in production for GM cars, and TI DSP processor-based controllers allows hybrid simulation of the braking system and vehicle dynamics. We have recently established a test bed for continuously variable transmission control. The OSU Autonomous Car, supported through the Center for Intelligent Transportation Research, (CITR) is a testbed for control algorithms and sensor integration. Please see the CITR web page for more details on our research in intelligent transportation systems. Please see below for some information on a few of our automotive control system experiments.

Typically students do research on such automotive control system problems after taking at least one of our laboratory courses: EE 757 Control Laboratory I or EE 758 Control Laboratory II.



The FOSU Network


The FOrd OSU Control Network is an experimental facility for investigating issues related to real time implementation of control algorithms on a distributed network. The hardware for the network has been supplied by Ford Motor Company and provides a multitude of experimental possibilities. A number of PC's are supported and each can accomplish real-time control, either independently or sharing data across the network. The network itself can be loaded with traffic to emulate multiple users and delays.


Control of Braking Systems

Benchtop brake system control experiment:


Field Tests of Brake Control System and the Transportation Research Center, East Liberty Ohio:




Electric Vehicle Research / Industrial Controls Research


Continuously Variable Transmissions: In this project a testbed is being developed for evaluation of controllers for a continuously variable transmission. The testbed consists of a DC motor for a drive, an electronically actuated pulley system, and a dynomometer for a load. We are also going to develop a testbed that uses a hydrostatic speed variator as the transmission.

Control of Switched Reluctance Motors: We have been studying the modeling, simulation, identification, and control of a switched reluctance motor. The control studies focus on torque ripple reduction. The experiment is a small-scale testbed for evaluating the possibility of using switched reluctance motors for electric vehicles.



This page is still under construction.