Electric power steering (EPS) systems under existing vehicle power systems cannot provide enough power for heavy-duty commercial vehicles under pivot or low-speed steering conditions. To solve this problem, the paper proposes an EPS system that is based on the hybrid power system constituted by the vehicle power system and the supercapacitor in parallel. In order to provide a theoretical basis for the intervention and withdrawal mechanisms of a super-capacitor in the new EPS, the law of steering resistance torque at a low or extremely low vehicle speed should be explored. Firstly, the finite element model of tire/pavement was established to conduct the simulation and calculation of the low-speed steering friction force between the tire and pavement, and to obtain the fitting expression of the equivalent steering friction coefficient with the running speed of the tire. Secondly, the expression of the steering friction torque was deduced based on the calculus theory and mathematical model of the low-speed steering resistance torque, including the steering friction torque and aligning torques, established to conduct the simulation of the equivalent resistance torque applied on a steering column under low-speed condition. Subsequently, the real vehicle experiments were carried out and comparisons of the experimental results and simulation results was performed. The consistency indicated that the model of low-speed steering resistance torque had a high accuracy. Finally, the law of low-speed steering resistance torque with a vehicle speed and steering wheel angle were analyzed according to the 3D surface plot drawn from the simulation results.

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Electric power steering system (EPS) with traditional power supply can't provide enough power for heavy-duty vehicle to turn at low speed. To solve the problem, a novel EPS with hybrid power supply was constructed. In this paper, firstly, mathematical model of the EPS with hybrid power supply was established including model of hybrid power supply system and basic model of EPS. Then the power mode recognition was obtained according to the certain threshold of steering resistance torque, state of charge (SOC) of super-capacitor and output voltage of the vehicle power supply, and the corresponding finite automaton model was built. The EPS system with hybrid power supply was regarded as a hybrid system due to continuous event in a single mode and discrete event during mode switching process, thus the multi-mode switching control strategy was proposed. Taken the different characteristics of hybrid power supply in different power modes into account, the corresponding local controllers were designed which were consisted of fuzzy-PID controller, active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) and sliding mode controller. Besides, the fuzzy supervisory controller was also designed to ensure the stability of the hybrid system during mode switching process. The simulation results show that the local controllers can achieve fast and accurate track of target current in each power mode, and the fuzzy supervisor can effectively ensure the stability of the switching process, which demonstrates the feasibility of the control strategy.