Control Engineering Practice 16 (2008) 874–883 Active damping of automotive powertrain oscillations by a partial torque compensator M. Berriria,b,c,/C3, P. Chevrela,b, D. Lefebvrec aIRCCyN, UMR CNRS 6597, 1 rue de la Noe ¨, BP 92101, 44321 Nantes Cedex 3, France bEcole des Mines, 4 rue Alfred Kastler, BP 20722, 44307 Nantes Cedex 3, France cPSA Peugeot Citroe ¨n, 18 rue des fauvelles, 92256 La Garenne Colombes, France Received 18 July 2006; accepted 17 October 2007 Available online 3 December 2007 Abstract This paper deals with the problem of active damping of driveline oscillations in order to improve driveability and passenger comfort. Specifically, longitudinal vibrations which occur during transient changes in driver demand may affect driveability in a negative way.A robust and efficient controller is proposed, driving the engine in order to actively damp the driveline oscillations. The methodology considered is based on the prediction and compensation of the shaft torque at relevant frequencies. Contrary to previous work, it leads to a controller having only a few tuning parameters, with a clear meaning and can be adjusted directly on the vehicle. The whole design is described, including robustness analysis ( manalysis), backlash sensitivity, and discretization in a way that is compatible with the engine controller unit that works at a varying sampling rate. Finally, the results obtained with two different test cars are shown. They illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach that allows reducing significantly the development time. r2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Drivability; Active control; Tuning parameters 1. Introduction Increasingly intense international competition between car manufacturers leads to a situation where customerdemands ‘‘top of the line products’’. Several areas are ofimportance, such as performances, costs and driveability(the difference between the vehicle handling desired by the driver and the real behavior) of vehicle. The term driveability includes several aspects of the driver’s perception, which are highly subjective. The focusin this paper is the shuffle problem, which producesunpleasant oscillations of the car and negatively affectsthe passenger comfort. Therefore, it is interesting todevelop a controller that uses the engine as an actuatorto damp out the powertrain oscillations.Most of the existing engine control systems employ relatively simple strategies for vibration compensation.Often rudimentary, their designs are based on experimentand calibration and lead, however, to small stabilitymargins because of neglected delays. The time needed totune the parameters is normally several days in total. There is considerable interest in automotive industry to develop better systems more efficient and adaptable but still simple to tune. The main goal here is to reduce thedevelopment time. Reduced oscillations may be obtained by preventing fast variation of the torque demand (input shaping). Thevehicle will then tend to feel sluggish. The problem withthis solution is that the customers will most likely notaccept this kind of behavior for a modern vehicle. A second possibility is to actively control the engine torque with respect to the driveline dynamics. Someapproaches, dealing with active control of the powertrainduring transient have already been reported in theliterature. Robust pole placement ( Richard, Chevrel, & Maillard, 1999 ;Stewart, Zavala, & Flemming, 2005 ),H NARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/conengprac 0967-0661/$ - see front matter r2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.conengprac.2007.10.010/C3Corresponding author. Ecole des Mines, 4 rue Alfred Kastler, BP 20722, 44307 Nantes Cedex 3, France. Tel.:+33 156473636;fax: +33 156478084. E-mail address: mberriri@emn.fr (M. Berriri).optimization ( Lefebvre, Chevrel, & Richard, 2003 ), Model predictive control ( Lagerberg & Egardt, 2005 ;Baumann, Torkzadeh, Ramstein, Kiencke, & Schlegl, 2005 ) and opt