Hardware-in-the-loop Simulation for Electro-mechanical Brake

The X-by-wire technology, replacing mechanical components with electrical components, is essential to realizing an intelligent vehicle. The technology has many advantages including component reduction, design freedom increase and safety improvement. Brake-by-wire replaces hydraulic brake systems with electrical components. As a part of the X-by-wire technology, the brake-by-wire technology has been actively researched. The technology has a great advantage of solving manufacturing, maintenance and environmental problems associated with hydraulic systems. However, due to absence of mechanical or hydraulic back-up, the brake-by-wire system must be highly reliable and fault-tolerant. This requires environment in which the system can be developed and tested safely, before applying to an actual vehicle. The environment must be flexible in developing and testing various algorithms, and be faithful in reproducing the actual system. This study thus develops a brake-by-wire hardware-in-the-loop simulation system that can serve as the environment mentioned above. The electro-mechanical brake type has been adopted in this study for developing the system. A procedure to develop the system was defined and followed to design a brake actuator, select a motor, build hardware components, set up the whole system, and test for performance evaluation. A preliminary test of the developed system shows its effectiveness. However, the test also shows that the response speed of the system should improve. A follow-up study will be conducted to improve system response, develop a full-scale system, and integrate with a steer-by-wire system