Robust Gear Shifting Force Control of a Solenoid Actuator in an Automated Manual Transmission of an Electric Vehicle via µ-Synthesis

This paper proposes a multi-physics approach to the force control of an electromagnetic solenoid system utilized to perform the gear shifting in an electric vehicle equipped with an automated manual transmission. Considering different operating conditions of the electric vehicles, the operating temperature of the gear shifting system varies on the time scales of minutes, hours, days and seasons. Such a temperature variation affects the performance of the gear shifting process in electric vehicles which are equipped with automated manual transmissions and causes a considerable uncertainty in the dynamical behavior of the gear shifting system. The aim of the present study is to develop a control strategy to perform an efficient gear shifting in different operating temperatures. To this end, a coupled thermal-electromagnetic modeling approach is followed to identify the uncertainty model and to model the perturbed systems. The accuracy of the obtained uncertainty model is verified by a set of experiments. Knowing the perturbed systems, the μ-synthesis robust control technique is employed to design a robust closed-loop force control system which ensures a satisfactory gear shifting over the entire range of operating temperatures. The simulation results validate the robustness, performance, and stability criteria.