Design and Control of a Steering Wheel Vibration Simulator

The design and control of a steering wheel vibration simulator capable of reproducing a set of desired vibration/acceleration signals is presented. The simulator is to be used in characterizing human perception of vibration as transmitted to the hand through the steering wheel. Accelerometers were used to record the acceleration at the top of the steering wheel in both the up-down (z) and side-to-side (y) directions. A two degree-of-freedom controller was synthesized with a stabilizing feedback controller designed using linear matrix inequality techniques and a zero phase error tracking feedforward controller. Simulation and experimental results to verify key steps of the design process and the effectiveness of the simulator are presented.