Immediate Manual-Automatic Vehicle Control Transitions based on Dynamic Initial Conditioning

With more vehicle control systems providing partial or more complete automatic control functions in passenger vehicles, it is necessary to ensure smooth and immediate transitions between driver's manual control and automated control. This paper presents a novel switching method for achieving immediate and smooth manual-automatic vehicle control transitions. An open-loop dynamic initial conditioning module is added to the existing closed-loop automatic steering control to provide suitable references to the automatic steering controller. This open-loop dynamic initial conditioning is designed as a vehicle regulation control with gains and bandwidth lower than the automatic steering controller so as to achieve immediate, smooth transitions. Moreover, as the reference converges to zero, the overall automatic steering control system naturally becomes the original automatic steering control without any explicit transition. The proposed method was implemented in a test vehicle and test runs with over 250 switches in 300 seconds up to 140 km/h were conducted. The test results demonstrate that the proposed design has achieved immediate and smooth transitions between manual control and automated control.