Modelling of human-vehicle dynamic interactions and control of vehicle active systems

This paper proposes a cascaded system model to represent dynamic interactions between human driver and vehicle. The human dynamics is the top subsystem in the cascaded model. Through a backstepping control design procedure, an overall control scheme is developed to guarantee the entire dynamic system stability. The proposed methodology can be directly applied to model and control many vehicle active systems, such as the active suspension and active restraint systems that interact with the human driver to achieve better safety, comfort and ride quality. Using a complete digital human model, an advanced simulation study is performed to visualise the realistic dynamic motion during a car frontal collision and verify the developed control scheme for the vehicle active restraint system.