Integrated bees algorithm and artificial neural network to propose an efficient controller for active front steering control of vehicles

Abstract

In this paper, a new optimal adaptive controller for the active front steering control of a vehicle is proposed. Due to the availability and applicability of proportional-integrator-derivative (PID) controllers, this controller is picked up; but, to overcome its limitations, two optimization and adaptation schemes are employed. The reference transfer function between the yaw rate of a typical vehicle and its steering angle is derived. The actual dynamics is simulated using CarSim toolbox of MATLAB. Best vehicle handling was aimed to be reached for three famous driving manoeuvres by proposing an efficient but economic controller. An optimization is done on the PID coefficients for a specific road condition using the honey bees' algorithm, and then a two-layer artificial neural network is trained using the back propagation learning rule to adjust the controller coefficients for any arbitrary road conditions. The uncontrolled, desired, optimized controlled, and optimized plus trained controlled yaw rate of vehicles are drawn for three manoeuvers and three road conditions. The integral of squared error between the desired and actual trajectories for different manoeuvers and road conditions are evaluated and compared between each other. The performance of the proposed PID controller that was optimized by Bees Algorithm and trained by a neural network was proved. It is noted that the optimized PID controller is good for all road conditions but not excellent. The more we move away from the reference road (in which, the optimization is done), the error will be larger. Thus for other conditions, using the artificial neural network can help decrease the error significantly.