This paper examines the complete design of an electronic throttle control system.
This systemis a safety-critical, embedded control application, and so the design of the
systemextends beyond the analysis of the closed-loop behavior of the plant and a controller.
The necessary reliability and ability to detect and handle hardware failures creates particular
hardware requirements. Differential equations that describe the hardware are derived so
that control strategies can be designed and simulated before they are tested on the hardware.
The presence of Coulomb and static friction in the dynamics of the throttle plate motivates
the use of a non-linear control law. Sliding mode and adaptive sliding mode control laws are
derived for controlling the throttle plate dynamics. The adaptive control law provides an
on-line estimate of the friction, which can identify a throttle body with excessive friction.
Besides the control of the throttle position, the systemm ust be integrated into the higherlevel
goals of a powertrain controller.
