Abstract
SD (Smart Door) is a human friendly power-assisted door system initially targeted for passenger car doors. The Smart Door offers comfort and safety to passengers or/and drivers by supplying additional power. Amount of power supplied by the Smart Door system is depend on the environment where the automotive is situated. It realizes comfort, for example, when the force applied by the passenger to the door is expected to be abnormal, the SD system tries to compensate passenger's effort by supplying additional force. In this study, to enhance the ease of opening and closing the doors of the passenger vehicle, a Smart Door with a power assist mechanism consisting of a motor was developed and analysed. A power assist mechanism mounted within the vehicle's door is designed and modeled for simulation purpose. The required force necessary to control the designed mechanism during the vehicle's roll, pitch and the opening angle of the door has been considered. To this end, we propose a power-assisting control strategy called "gravity cancellation". The system is analysed by numerical simulation with the gravity cancellation control algorithm.
