University of Sunderland

Automotive Mechatronics & Control

Considerable expertise has been built up in control system design and practical application. These involve fuzzy logic controllers, software for controller design,  process and sensor fault detection, neural nets, network planning tools and system identification methods. This has led to EPSRC research grant funding for toolkits for advanced sensor validation in process control applications (EPSRC Toolkits: £241k, Prof Chris Cox). These techniques have been exploited extensively in the process industries.

More recently, this expertise has been applied in the automotive industries in, for example, intelligent chassis control and in hybrid vehicle transmission control. The integration of vehicle dynamics and control is a particularly strong research area. In this field, notable publications have resulted in the areas of continuously variable transmissions, integrated vehicle dynamics control, simulation of a semi active suspension, dynamics & control of gearshifts on twin clutch transmissions and intelligent ABS control.