Simultaneous Structure-Control Optimization of a Steering Wheel for Vibration Suppression

Abstract

This paper presents both simulation and experimental investigations into the simultaneous design of a steering wheel and its control system for vibration suppression. The research consists of two steps. In the first step, the simultaneous optimization is formulated as a general nonlinear programming problem with the closed-loop H_∞ norm as objective function. Then the problem is solved by an iterative approach in which the control designs are nested into the structural designs. The simulation results show that the simultaneously optimized system gives much better performance than the original one. In the second step, experiments are performed to verify the effectiveness of the new design method. To deal with the effects of modeling error and system uncertainty, in the experiments µ synthesis is used instead of H_∞ control. It is found from the experimental results that the optimized structure is still superior to the original one after the redesign of control.