Development of Steering Control System for Autonomous Vehicle

Automation can help us to reduce the number of crashes on our roads. Through research it is identified that 94 percent of the accidents that occur are because of driver behavior or error as a factor and self-driving vehicles can help reduce driver error. High levels of automation have the potential to reduce risky and dangerous driver behavior and prevent accidents. The main aim is to convert the manual operated steering of the vehicle into fully autonomous steering. The objective of Steering Control System is to control the vehicle’s steering while the vehicle is in motion and also to take accurate decisions while making a turn from the given inputs. The main purpose to develop a steering system for the autonomous vehicle is to replace the manual steering of the vehicle into driverless steering. The steering control is responsible for the vehicle’s steering i.e., at what desired angle the vehicle need to turn. A PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) controller and an encoder is basically used to control the system based on the necessary conditions and requirement’s. For the vehicle’s steering the encoder is used to generate pulses when the steering wheel is turned so that those pulse values can be sent to the DC Motor which is attached to the front axle which is responsible for the vehicle to turn. This autonomous vehicle is a Level-4 automation system and the benefit of this automation is that the vehicle can be even operated in manual mode whenever it’s necessary.