Automatic Controller Calibration for Electromechanical Drum Brakes with Safe Bayesian Optimization

The brake system is a vital component in passenger and commercial vehicles. Due to the electrified mobility trend, brake-by-wire technologies have gained research interest while regenerative braking possibilities simultaneously reduce the usage of friction brakes. This makes the use of drum brakes attractive for electric vehicles since they are less prone to corrosion and can help to reduce brake dust emissions with their encapsulated design. A possibility to integrate drum brakes into the X-by-wire framework is to replace the hydraulic actuation with electromechanical actuators. This imposes new challenges in the control of braking systems due to increased mechanical complexity. In this paper we investigate an automatic controller tuning method for electromechanical drum brakes based on safe Bayesian optimization. The method does not require a mathematical model of the actuator mechanism and works directly with data collected on a real system. Several experiments with different hardware setups illustrate the method’s effectiveness.