Uncertainty-oriented optimal impedance control for EPS-human system with reliability evaluation

This study proposes an interval optimal impedance control method for the electric power steering- human (EPS-H) system with reliability constraints. Considering the relationship between the lateral control using electric power steering of the vehicle and the human, a position-based impedance control model for the integrated EPS-H system is first developed. Polynomial chaos expansion in the surrogate model is employed to establish the interval state-space equation to obtain the bounded responses of the impedance control system using the interval dimensional analysis method. Moreover, the influence of uncertain parameters on the overall control system is obtained by deriving the interval optimal control law consisting of the interval linear quadratic tracking (LQT) inner loop and the interval impedance control outer loop through the interval uncertainty analysis. Furthermore, a non-probabilistic time-varying reliability method is proposed to evaluate the safety of the whole impedance system using the partial derivatives with respect to the uncertain parameters derived from the interval state-space equation. Regarding the nominal cost function and steady-state error of nominal responses as two optimization objectives, the multi-objective reliability-based design optimization is built and solved. Finally, a numerical example of the impedance control model for the EPS-H system is applied to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.