Coordinated Motor Speed Control Design for Seating Systems

Automotive seating systems have become much more sophisticated in terms of providing more flexible configurations and comfort functionalities to the consumer. Regular power seating with a few motors to move and adjust the seat position has turned to be more technical advanced reconfigurable systems with more sensors and actuators, such as Easy Entry, Zero Gravity, Stadium Swivel IP Nesting, Power Long Rails etc. The overall control of the seating becomes more and more like the robotics control with many coordinated movements. In this paper, a novel control strategy is proposed for the coordinated speed controls of multiple motors. Unlike traditional seating controls, other than the open loop controls, a feed-back approach is proposed together with a Kalman-filter based speed estimation via raw signal of Hall Effect sensor. The control of multiple motors at the same time will also be coordinated and synchronized properly, so that the seat will move in coordination, will not only not to collide with other objects, but also provide a comfortable experience to the consumer. Controls design is discussed in details, simulation and experiment data will be implemented with the real system and discussed in the paper.