Electric Power Steering Automation for Autonomous Driving

The automatic control of a vehicle's steering wheel is now one of the most important challenges in the Intelligent Transportation Systems field. In this paper, we present a fuzzy logic-based automatic steering control system for mass-produced electric power steering (EPS) wheel-equipped vehicles that assures human-like behavior. In the literature, we find a lot of theoretical proposals and some simulations, but only a few work teams offer real solutions for this task. One such solution is the work developed by the Autopia Program in which some vehicles have been automated and can perform some maneuvers mimicking human reactions. In this paper, we use the EPS of a Citroen C3 Pluriel to effect the car's behavior. The actuator is controlled from an onboard computer housing a fuzzy logic-based autonomous steering system. The vehicle's internal computers generate the input information, which is read by a CAN bus and a high precision GPS. Some experiments using this equipment on a private test circuit are presented, obtaining an human-like behavior in all the maneuvers.