Shared control for lane departure prevention based on the safe envelope of steering wheel angle

Abstract The ability to prevent lane departure has become an important feature for commercialized vehicles. This paper proposes a shared steering assistance strategy based on a safe envelope of steering wheel angle (SWA). This solves the human-machine conflict issue in lane departure prevention (LDP) system which uses steering control to help the driver keep the vehicle within the correct lane. The system combines a driver steering control model, current vehicle states and vehicle-road deviation. The desired SWAs are calculated when the driver intends to drive along the left or right side of the lane, and then the two angles are used to generate the safe envelope. Next, a driver intention estimator is designed to predict driver’s intended SWA and the assistance control is activated by judging whether the driver intended SWA is go beyond the safe envelope. Finally, a H∞ controller and a disturbance observer are developed to determine the assistance torque. In this way, the SWA is limited to safe values to mitigate lane departure and the controller intervention is minimized. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated via numerical simulation with different driving scenarios and human-in-the-loop experiment on a driving simulator. The obtained results show that this method not only can avoid lane departures effectively, but also ensures a good human-machine cooperative performance.