EE 490 · Senior Design · 2025–26
Drive-by-wire control system for a high-efficiency vehicle
Replacing the mechanical steering, throttle and brake linkages of the PSU Eco Team’s Urban Concept EV with closed-loop electronic actuation — the prerequisite step before any autonomy can be added. Every subsystem keeps its mechanical path intact as a backup, because the failure modes of a car you can no longer steer are not the kind you design around afterwards. Controllers were modelled and tuned in Simulink, then validated on a bench-top rig before anything went near the vehicle.
- Vehicle
- PSU Eco Team Urban Concept EV
- Subsystems
- Steer-, throttle- and brake-by-wire
- Steering
- 12 V PMDC worm-gear motor, AS5600 12-bit encoder
- Braking
- 100 N / 100 mm linear actuator, position feedback
- ECU
- ESP32 prototype, control loops at 100 Hz
- Control
- PID / PI tuned in MATLAB & Simulink
- Measured
- 30° step settled in ~0.25 s, ~5% overshoot
- Safety
- Manual override, watchdog, E-stop isolation < 1 s
- Standards
- ISO 26262, IEEE 29148, Shell Eco-marathon 2025
- My role
- Systems engineer — requirements, traceability, safety & standards, test data analysis
Team Mohammed Alwetaid Baraa Alsalamah Abdullah Aljamhoor