Research on the Control Strategy for Handling Stability of Electric Power Steering System with Active Front Wheel Steering Function

Due to the presence of uncertain disturbances in the actual steering system, disturbances in the system may affect the handling stability of the vehicle. Therefore, this article proposes an integrated steering system control strategy with stronger anti-disturbance performance. When disturbances exist in the system, the proposed control strategy effectively reduces the attitude changes during the vehicle steering process. In the upper-level control strategy, a variable transmission ratio curve is designed to coordinate the high-speed handling stability and low-speed steering sensitivity of the vehicle. On this basis, a sideslip angle observer is proposed based on the extended state observation theory, which does not depend on an accurate system model, thus determining the intervention timing of the active front wheel steering system. In the lower-level control strategy, DR-PI/DR-PID controllers are designed for the integrated steering system. Finally, experiments are conducted in the CarSim/Simulink joint simulation environment. The results indicate that compared to traditional PI/PID controllers and advanced ADRC controllers, DR-PI/DR-PID controllers can effectively suppress step disturbances, sinusoidal disturbances, and white noise disturbances while ensuring the dynamic response characteristics of the system. Under double-lane conditions, the root mean square values of the yaw rate and sideslip angle decrease by 4.35% to 12.3% and 3.21% to 7.72%, respectively. Therefore, the designed control strategy can improve handling stability while ensuring the robustness of the system.