Flatness Based Control

of an Automatic Clutch

Jean LEVINE

Centre Automatique et Syst`mes, Ecole des Mines de Paris,

e
35 rue Saint-Honor, 77305 Fontainebleau Cedex, France.
e
E-mail: levine@cas.ensmp.fr

VALEO Clutch, 15 rue des Rosiers

93585 Saint-Ouen, France.
E-mail: bernard.remond@valeo.com

Keywords. Automatic clutch system, nonlinear systems, atness, trajectory planning, cascade control design.

Abstract
In this paper, we study the control of an automatic
clutch where the pedal has been replaced by an actuator
positionning the clutch disk (more precisely the clutch
bearing), without modifying the gear box and gear stick.
We present a cascade regulation of the clutch system
based on the atness property of its model and based
on measurements of the vehicle speed, the thermal engine speed, the gear number, the force applied to the
gear stick (push-pull sensor), and the throttle. The aim
is to control the vehicle speed to prevent from abrupt
acceleration changes and from over- and under-speeds
of the thermal engine, while complying to the drivers
requests on the gear stick and the acceleration pedal (or
throttle). We show how to design reference trajectories
for the vehicle speed and a two-level feedback to fulll
these demands.

Bernard REMOND

Introduction

A traditional clutch is needed to progressively transmit

motor torques to the wheels at start and while changing
gear (see gure 1). It may be partially or fully automatized according to various technologies [3]. The present
paper concerns a technologically simple approach, developed by VALEO, where the traditional clutch and gear
stick are kept untouched, but where the clutch pedal
Work supported by VALEO Electronics and VALEO Clutch.
The authors wish to express their warm thanks to Antonin DEMAZY who signicantly contributed to this project at the occasion of his graduation memoir of Electrical Engineer from the
Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, under the supervision of the authors.

Clutch system
xb

Thermal
motor

Cm
Motor
torque

Cc
Clutch
torque

Gear box
bo
Cw

Cc

Wheels
torque

xb

Figure 1: The clutch function: full or partial transmission to the wheels of the torque delivered by the thermal
motor.
is removed. It is replaced by an actuator controlling
the clutch position (more precisely the clutch bearing
positionsee gure 2), and therefore the torque transmission. Consequently, the feedback regulation of the
vehicle speed, traditionnally manually realized by the
driver, may be replaced by a computer controller that
assigns the clutch bearing position in view of several
measurements: vehicle speed, thermal engines speed,
gear number, force applied to the gear stick (push-pull
sensor), actuator position, throttle.
The actuators controller must be designed to prevent
from abrupt acceleration changes, to improve the equipment reliability, increase its duty cycle, and satisfactorily manage the thermal engine over- and under-speeds
as well as various failure modes. Moreover, it must realize a tradeo between power of the actuator and size
and energy consumption, which must be kept as low as
possible. Another tradeo concerns lowering the control algorithm complexity, to decrease the cost of the
computer, versus keeping high control performances.
In driving operations, various sequences consisting in
engaging and releasing the clutch are required, in particular at starts, stops, or gear shifts.
Disengaging the clutch (that corresponds to engaging

Clutch

Plate

Compensating
spring
spring
For
ork

Bearing
Bearing

Bearing
Bearing position

Hydraulic
Hydraulic
transmission
ansmission

Nut
Screw
Scre

Motor

Power
er
electronics

Actuator's position

Figure 2: The actuator, the hydraulic transmission and

the clutch system.

the clutch pedal in traditional clutch systems) means

that, according to the drivers action on the gear stick or
if the engine speed is too low, the actuator fastly moves
the clutch bearing out of its engaged position (10mm in
less than 0.1s) to decouple the wheels from the thermal
engine.
Engaging the clutch (that corresponds to releasing the
clutch pedal in traditional clutch systems) means that,
at start or when leaving the neutral, the actuator fastly
moves the clutch bearing to a position called touching
point where the plate surfaces arrive in contact, then
progressively synchronizes the engine and wheel speeds,
to nally lock the clutch. This sequence must be done
smoothly, i.e. with gentle speed and acceleration variations, but more or less quickly, depending on the throttle.
These two phases may be combined in several sequences composed of an initialisation step (due to a
drivers action on the gear stick or on the throttle), an
end (locked clutch), and/or a change (a new drivers request on the gear stick or on the throttle before the end
has occured).
A model, composed by two subsystems, is presented.
The rst part (low-level) expresses the force balance between the actuator and the screw, or equivalently the
clutch throwout bearing. The second part (high-level)
describes the thermal engine torque transmission to the
wheels. The current in the actuator is the system input.
This model is shown to be at, with the vehicle speed
as a at output [5, 6]. Moreover, its cascade structure
allows us to control the vehicle speed by the gear bearing
position and the latter (at a faster rate) by the actuator
drive current.
Depending on the drivers action on the gear stick and
the throttle, a reference trajectory of the vehicle speed
is computed on-line as a polynomial of time, starting
from the present measured vehicle speed, and then reference trajectories of the clutch bearing and of the actuator drive current are deduced from Flatness. Moreover,
a feedback is designed to stabilize the system around
the computed reference trajectories while preserving the
cascade structure. The reference trajectories are recomputed on a receding horizon each time a change is re-

quired by the driver, and their tracking is ensured by

the same xed feedback, thus combining atness and
predictive control.
Simulations on a validated numerical model are presented. We show that the performances of this controller
are not signicantly deteriorated under sampling with a
large sampling period, more than ten times larger than
the one obtained by a linear approach and ensuring a
comparable tracking behavior.

Modelling

Let us denote by m the angle of the actuator (the electrical motor driving the clutch bearing, not to be confused with the thermal engine) and let m be its angular

velocity, m = m . We denote by Im the motor current

and by Cr the resisting torque, a non linear function
of the actuators position m and of the sign of its velocity sign (m ). It corresponds to the torque on the
actuators screw resulting from the dierence between
the force exerted on the clutch bearing, transmitted by
the hydraulic system, and the force exerted by the compensating spring (see gure 2). The function Cr is obtained oine from real data. Its detailed expression is
not needed here and is omitted.
The actuator dynamics are thus described by
m = m

Jm m = fv m + Km Im Cr (m , sign (m ))

(1)

where
Jm is the motor inertia,
Km the torque constant,
fv the coecient of viscous friction, assumed linear
in the velocity.
Here, the current Im may be considered as an input
to this subsystem.
We also need a model describing the eects of the
clutch on the cars speed. By Newtons second principle, the vehicle acceleration, multiplied by the vehicles
mass, is equal to the torque exerted on the wheels divided by the radius of the wheel, the frictions being
neglected.
1

M V = Cw (xb , j, ) ,
r

xb = m

(2)

where
M is the vehicle mass, r the wheel radius and a
constant,
V is the vehicle speed (measured),
Cw is the torque exerted on the wheels,
xb is the clutch bearing position,

 j is the gear number (measured),

is the throttle valve opening percentage (measured).
Cw is a nonlinear function of the bearing position xb ,
and thus of m , of the gear number j and of the throttle . Practically speaking, it is obtained once for all,
oine, by direct measurements on the vehicle. Indeed,
the function Cw depends on the vehicle. We do not give
here its detailed expression, unnecessary for the control
design. We will only use the fact that Cw is an increasing function of xb for each value of the pair (j, ), which
implies in particular that the clutch bearing position xb
can be deduced from the torque Cw knowing j and :
1

xb = Cw (rM V , j, ).
Note that this model is deliberately simplied: it
does not take into account the road prole, frictions on
the tyres and the transmission, or additional loads such
as trailers, which are not supposed to be measured in
practice. These quantities may be considered as disturbances.
In this subsystem (2), xb can be considered as the
input of this subsystem.

Flatness

A system is said to be dierentially at [5, 6] if there

exists a set of independent variables referred to as at
output such that every other system variable (including
the input variables) is a function of the at output and
a nite number of its successive time derivatives. More
precisely, the system
x = f (x, u),

with x Rn and u Rm is dierentially at if one can

nd a set of variables (at output)
y = h(x, u, u, u, . . . , u(p) ),

twice continuously dierentiable function of time, the

system (1), (2) is at with the vehicles velocity V as a
at output. We now briey show. Assuming that the
vehicle velocity V is known, as well as j and , from (2)
and the invertibility of the function Cw , we have
1

xb = Cw (rM V , j, ) ,

m =

1 1

C (rM V , j, ). (3)
w

Moreover, by (1),
Im =

1
(Jm m + fv m + Cr (m , sign (m ))) . (4)

Km

We have thus proven that xb , m and Im are functions

3

of V, V , V and V (3) = d V and that V is a at output.
dt3

Cascade control

The system (1)-(2) has a natural cascaded structure,

which is moreover compatible with the system atness:
the subsystem (1), whose input is the current Im , describing the behavior of the actuator, is much faster than
the subsystem (2) describing the vehicle behavior that
may be considered as controlled by the clutch bearing
position xb , or equivalently by the actuators position
m .
More precisely, if we are given a reference trajectory
of the cars speed V , it can be realized by suitably positionning the clutch bearing, using xb as a ctitious
input thanks to (3), and the clutch bearing position, in
turn, may be realized by (4). For this reason, we call
the subsystem (2) the high-level subsystem and (1) the
low-level subsystem.
This structure is not only useful for trajectory planning but also for the tracking of the corresponding trajectories by feedback.

y Rm

with p nite integer, such that

x = (y, y, y , . . . , y (q) )

u = (y, y, y , . . . , y (q+1) )

with q a nite integer, and such that the system equations
d
(y, y, y , . . . , y (q+1) ) =

dt

f ((y, y, y , . . . , y (q) ), (y, y, y , . . . , y (q+1) ))

are identically satised.
The reader is invited to refer to [5, 6] for further information concerning the various implications of this property on motion planning and feedback design.
In our case, if we assume that the gear number j and
the throttle are measured, and that is a piecewise

4.1

trajectory planning

According to (3), it suces to dene a reference trajectory for the vehicle speed V to obtain all the other
system variables. Moreover, V can be chosen arbitrarily
in the set of piecewise 3 times continuously dierentiable
functions of time. Let us consider a time interval [ti , tf ]
(which may depend on the required objective) and let
us denote by V the searched reference trajectory on
this interval. We are given the measurement of the initial speed Vi at the initial time ti , with its (estimated)

derivative Vi at ti (initial acceleration). At the nal time

tf , we may be given a nal speed Vf and acceleration

Vf . These data highly depend on the drivers objectives: start or stop, gear upward or downward shifts,
which involve engaging or disengaging the clutch more
or less fastly, depending on the thermal engines speed

and throttle. In any case, the nal acceleration Vf can

At the low-level, we dene

be chosen equal to 0. For Vf , the following formula gives

satisfactory results in practice:

m =

(ti )
1
+ k2
Vf = Vi + k1
j(ti )
1 + (ti )

(5)

where (ti ) and j(ti ) are the measured throttle value and
gear ratio at time (ti ) (momentarily assumed to remain
constant on [ti , tf ] this assumption will be removed in
section 5) and where k1 and k2 are tunable parameters,
whose tuning may be dierent for gear up or down. Note
1
that the term 1+ prevents Vf from being to close to
Vi which would prevent the clutch from locking when
the throttle is closed ( = 0), and that the ratio is
j
introduced to produce a larger acceleration for low gears.
By polynomial interpolation, V (t) is given by the
following 3rd degree polynomial:

V (t) = Vi + T Vi s(t)
2

+s (t) (V T Vi ) + (2V T Vi )(1 s(t))

(6)

1
xb

(11)

xb being dened by (9), and Im by (4) with m and m

in place of m and m . Then, setting

Im = Im k

Jm

(m m )
Km

(Cv (m , sign (m )) Cv (m , sign (m )))

Km
(12)
it results that the low-level closed-loop subsystem reads
+

m m = k(m m )

fv
(m m )

Jm

(13)

which is exponentially stable for every k > 0. Note

that the low-level subsystem (1) is supposed to be much
fv
faster than (2) which means in particular that Jm is
2

with
V = Vf Vi ,

T = tf ti and s(t) =

t ti
. (7)
T

Clearly, the clutch bearing reference x results from (3)

b
by replacing V by V given by (6). Accordingly, we may
deduce the reference trajectories of the actuators position m and of the current Im by (3-4) but the cascade
approach described in the next section, which recomputes on-line, at a faster rate, the motor and current
references has been preferred for robustness reasons.
Moreover, the duration T is chosen according to the
following formula:
T = Tmin +

Tmax Tmin
100

Cascaded feedback design

Let us consider the above dened reference trajectory

V and the corresponding reference x by (3). The highb
level tracking error is thus given by
1

M (V V ) = (Cw (xb , j, ) Cw (x , j, )) .
b
r
Therefore, it suces to adress the bearing position as
1
xb = Cw (Cw (x , j, ) rM kV (V V ), j, )
b

(9)

for which the tracking behavior is given by

V V = kV (V V )

V*
Driver

j,

(8)

where Tmax (resp. Tmin ) is the duration necessary to

realize the whole clutch engagement phase with = 0%
(resp. = 100%).

4.2

f
, the low-level
large. Therefore, if we set k = 2Jv
m
closed-loop subsystem (13), whose transfer function bef
comes (s+ 2Jv )2 , is exponentially stable and much faster
m
than (10) if kV is chosen small enough. The overall
stability of the system (10)-(13) follows from standard
singular perturbation theory [4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14].
The resulting two-level controller architecture is
shown in gure 3.

(10)

which is indeed exponentially stable for every kV > 0.

High-level
loop

m*

Low-level
loop

Im
Actuator

xb

VEHICLE

Figure 3: The controller architecture.

Remark In practice, compared to the actuators rate,

the clutch bearing position xb is a slowly evolving signal,
that can be even considered piecewise constant. Therefore, in place of recomputing it at each time according
to (9), it suces to consider its discretized version at
T and to approximate
a sampling period Tl with Tl
the reference (11) by a 3rd degree polynomial. These
implementation details are omitted here.

The driver in the loop

As was seen in formula (5), the throttle and gear

number j were assumed constant over the time interval [ti , tf ]. These measured inputs however are not controlled by the system and can be modied at any time
by the driver. Therefore, the system must be able to
include the new drivers requirements as fast as possible without risking to destabilize the clutch positionning

system. This is done in the following way: assume that

at any moment ti the driver modies or j.Then, since

the cars speed is measured, one can use Vi and Vi at

that time in (5)-6-8) and deduce the new reference trajectory on the interval [ti , ti + T ], which guarantees that
the junction between the previous reference trajectory
and the new one is smooth (see gure 4).

100

Throttle (%)
50

Gear ratio
0

10

12

10

12

10

12

10

12

10

12

TIME (s)
1000

Thermal motor speed

500

reference
defined
before
time t

smooth
change of
reference
trajectory

Vi

Vi

Gearbox speed
0
0

Actuator position

Vf

Vf

t+T

Remark Note that the fact that the speed reference

trajectory is recomputed on a receding horizon each time
a change is required by the driver, and that their tracking is ensured by the same xed feedback, may be viewed
as an attempt to combine atness and predictive control
[1, 13]. Other examples of this nature may be found in
[11]. See also [7].

Simulations

The following simulation has been realized on a validated simulator, namely a simulation program which
satisfactorily reproduces the measurements done on a
given car. It describes the evolution of the thermal engine speed, the car speed and acceleration, the clutch
bearing position and the motor current when starting
from 0 speed to the third gear ratio (j = 3) at approx.
80 km/h, with the throttle evolving in a large range
(from 0 to 100%).
One can see that, even if the driver pushes the accelerator pedal at its maximal position while changing
speed, the clutch locks fastly enough to avoid an engine
overspeed, and without too abrupt variation of acceleration.

Motor current
0

According to the above analysis, the controller is such

that the initial error on the cars speed will exponentially
decrease at a rate larger than or equal to kV and the
m
error on the clutch bearing position at the rate 2Jv
f
(whose magnitude in this application is approximately
0.1s). Thus, if we refresh the values of and j at a
lower rate, the low-level loop cannot be destabilized and
therefore, the car speed error will not grow, while the
vehicle will be able to react to the drivers request.

TIME (s)

Figure 4: Smooth modication of the reference trajectory according to a new drivers request on the gear stick
or the throttle.

TIME (s)

t
new reference

6
TIME (s)

10

Car acceleration
5

-5

6
TIME (s)

Figure 5: Simulation from start (0 km/h) to gear number 3 (approx. 80 km/h) in 12s.

Concluding remarks

We have presented here a method combining atness

and two-level cascaded feedback design to control the
vehicle speed with an automatic clutch system. The
nonlinearities of the system are mainly due to frictions
which are known with mediocre precision. However, the
robustness of the controller is sucient to produce satisfactory responses even when the clutch is old or when
the various coecients describing the motor and the frictions are corrupted by errors. Moreover, the sampletime version of this controller can be used directly with
a large sampling time (up to 20ms) without signicant
deterioration of the performances [2]. Note also that
the complexity of the real-time calculations is reasonable and the controller can be easily implemented on a
cheap 8-bit microprocessor [2].

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