This full text paper was peer-reviewed at the direction of IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society prior to the

acceptance and publication.

Smart Engine Speed Control System with ECU

System Interface
Mohamed Afify Alaeddin S. A. Abuabed Nesreen Alsbou
Department of Engineering & Physics Department of Engineering & Physics Department of Engineering & Physics
University of Central Oklahoma University of Central Oklahoma University of Central Oklahoma
Edmond, Ok, USA Edmond, Ok, USA Edmond, Ok, USA
mafify@[Link] aabuabed@[Link] nalsbou@[Link]

Abstract— Despite decades of reformative legislation Nowadays, cars are designed with electromechanical
regarding the safety of motorists and immense efforts by throttles equipped with electric air valves (EAVs). A typical
manufacturers to improve vehicle safety features, motor EAV gets an output signal from the Engine Control Unit
vehicle accidents related to speeding claim the lives of (ECU) with fixed values to maintain the appropriate motor
approximately 3000 teenagers (aged 16-19) each year. This speed measured in revolutions-per-minute (RPM). The ECU is
study proposes an embedded smart control system to limit responsible for predicting the atmosphere the car is moving in
the vehicle speed to the maximum allowable road speed. and capable of maintaining the engine RPM to work in all
This can be achieved by establishing a live communication conditions.
between the cruise control system and the onboard GPS A new Cruise Control technology has been developed in
module. Using the Engine Control Unit (ECU) to control 2013 by automakers to accommodate adaptive features, which
the electronic throttle and air valve, the maximum resulted in the Adaptive Cruise Controller (ACC). The new
rotational velocity of the engine can be limited so that the features involve smart systems to monitors the surrounding
vehicle's speed does not surpass a road speed limit. By atmosphere and controls the car accordingly. The control unit
implementing this embedded system to control the speed secures the speed of the car by adjusting the throttle according
of the motor vehicle, this system has the potential to to the traffic. The modern technology behind the ACC is a
reduce the number of speeding-related accidents. This radar system with low and high range to control the speed
study evaluates the practicability of the proposed depending on the car [1]. Another innovation is the Cruise
embedded system and discusses alternative controlling Control system design that relies on the Fuzzy PID technology.
methods. For this purpose, a graphical user interface This technology will set the speed value by sending a signal to
(GUI) module is also developed to make the system more set the throttle valve and reduce the speed of the deviation of
user-friendly. The data used to test the system was the valve plate which will regulate the vehicle speed [2].
collected through a GPS service from the streets around This research paper introduces a smart embedded system
the campus of the University of Central Oklahoma. that has the capability of communicating with the ECU and
controlling the throttle position to limit the engine RPM. This
Keywords— Cruise control system, PID controller, GPS service, can be realized by commanding the actuator to control the
Simulink, Engine control unit, smart driving, internet of things, throttle so the speed will be controlled between an initial speed
(typically zero) and a final speed (the road speed limit). In
I. INTRODUCTION addition, a closed loop system with a PID controller is
developed to control the actual throttle position that leads to
Cruise Control Systems are among the most powerful the desired referenced speed. The PID controller will operate
inventions in the modern mechanical systems. The cruise based on the information provided by an onboard GPS module.
control theory relies on the idea of vehicle constant speed In return, the GPS module will detect the coordinates of the
regulator that was invented in early 1900. The idea of the road and discover the speed limit of the road. This system also
cruise control is based on maintaining the throttle angular aims to control the behavior of the driver when attempting to
position based on the engine load so the engine can secure a bypass the embedded system and over speed the vehicle.
stable speed limit. This can be achieved by utilizing the Therefore, the proposed system is designed to host a GSM
driveshaft rotations on the road and positioning the throttle to module to communicate with the registered number to alert
maintain the vehicle speed at the referenced speed. The motor about an attempt to bypass the system.
cruise control was later invented in 1948 but not The simulated system architecture is implemented using a
commercialized until 1958. The demand on the vehicles
software design of MATLAB® Simulink to interface the
equipped with cruise controllers increased in 1973. This
increase in demand was driven by the increase in oil prices. A throttle system and the PID controller. In addition, a micro C
more sophisticated cruise control system was developed in language is developed to control the embedded microchip. The
1992 by Mitsubishi Motors. This system allows for detecting system will have two communication devices that will collect
the distance between vehicles and controlling the speed data and send it to the module; a speedometer Vehicle Speed
accordingly. Sensor (VSS) and the GPS module. The VSS is usually located

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in the transmission housing and will act as the feedback that The microcontroller also has a Can BUS library to
reports the actual car speed to be compared with the reference communicate with the ECU unit. A simple diagram showing
speed provided by the GPS module. The PID controller will be the details of the MC unit is shown in Fig. 2.
implemented in the embedded system to control the input
B. Neo-6M GPS Module
signal before it goes to the ECU. The PID controller is
designed by Simulink suit to tune the proportional, integral and
The GPS Module will communicate with the Rx and Tx of
differential gains, , & , of the controller from any the MC of the system to send commands. The main event of
error changes for every input. the system is to send the Coordinates of the vehicle location
II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION and, depending on the readings, it will limit the speed of the
engine. The module is accurate in the serial data. According to
The embedded system consists of a microcontroller that the Neo-6M datasheet, the horizontal position accuracy is 2.5
controls the GPS module, GSM module and an LCD screen m and the time pulse signal is 30 ns. The GPS Module is
for the user. The system controls the car intake/engine system equipped with an antenna GPS 900-1 with a frequency of
that will be simulated by using the GUI to interface the 1575.42 MHz to boost the power of signal to increase the
implemented system as shown in Fig. 1. accuracy of the Module [3].

C. SIM900 GSM Module

The module will play a role in monitoring the driver’s

behavior when attempting to disable the GPS module to
bypass the speed-limiting controller. The GSM module is
responsible for sending a signal, in the form of SMS
message, to the cell phone associated with the module to
alert about an attempt of disabling the service. This will
help parents to monitor their teenager drivers and
companies to monitor their business vehicle drivers [4].

D. LCD display

The display will alert the driver with the updates of

the speed that the device is limiting the engine to. It will
also display the current vehicle speed. The LCD is a
Fig. 1. Speed Control System Architecture graphics display for a 16 bit and 32 bit microcontrollers.

A. PIC18 Microchip E. Power Supply

The PIC18 is microchip that hosts the microcontroller The system is operating at 5 volts. This voltage will be
(MC) AN937. This chip is used to implement the PID system provided by the car battery. A 5 volts regulator will be used to
to control the ECU unit. The PID system is employed on a make sure the system does not experience a delay in the case
board with a 4 MHz clock, 4.7 kΩ resistor, two 22 pf of any voltage drop or increase.
capacitors, and a 7805 voltage regulator. To debug and burn
the program on the microcontroller, we will use Pickit III. SYSTEM ALGORTHIM
programmer to burn the code. The code is written in C
language and it will be simulated and tested on proteus and The throttle is the main body of the vehicle
debug by winpic800. The microcontroller has 5 main ports to electromechanical air intake system. The throttle is the
communicate with the circuit. responsible part of regulating the amount of air flowing into
the combustion system. This is done in response to the gas
accelerator pedal input. In this research effort, we propose
using an Electronic Throttle Control (ETC) unit to
electronically connect the accelerator pedal to the throttle. The
ETC is directly operated by a DC drive motor and a gear box
to control the position of the Valve plate as shown in Fig. 3.
The PID controller will determine the reference throttle angle
and send a signal to the ECU with a specific frequency to
adjust the throttle plate. For this purpose, we developed a
Fig. 2. Architecture of the MC rule nonlinear PID control system, as the traditional PID will not
provide the high precision of the plate control [5].
 The system can be described mathematically using the
questions [6]:

Equation (1) represents the torques of the motor, the

spring, and the damping, respectively,
Where: is the spring constant, is a friction constant, and
is a torque. Where the differential equation in (2) represents
the plate angle position of the electronic throttle with is the
throttle plate inertia.

The PID communicates with the ECU unit which, in

Fig. 3. ETC unit with Mechanical components return, will regulate the throttle plate position. The throttle
To control the electronic throttle through the mechanical plate angle will be determined to provide a specific motor
parameters, we treated the throttle valve to have three acting output RPM that leads to the desired vehicle speed in
torques; (1) the motor torque that operates the gearbox, (2) the mile/hour. Therefore, the overall system is having two
feedback-closed loops to continuously report the throttle angle
spring torque that controls the plate, and (3) the damping
position and the vehicle speed, as shown in Fig. 4.
torque that affects the mechanical system.

Fig. 4. Control system rule

IV. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION

A. PID Controller firmware Implementing

The Microcontroller that will control the system is AN937

[7], which is embedded in a pic18 microchip. This microchip
has an implemented PID system. The PIC18 series
Implemented code is fully functional system with a feedback
that has the features needed in the Control unit. The PID
functions that implemented in the system fits the simulations
values of the calculated error and the PID interrupt. The
firmware of the system can be modified to fit the embedded
system as it receives an error in the range of percentage 0-
Fig. 5. PID firmware implementation
100% (8-bit). The system has variable declarations of the
proportional, integral and derivative that range between 0 and The proportional gain of the system is multiplied by the
15, the gain has a maximum of 8-bit with a max value of 255. error and stored in a variable as in (4), and used later to
The firmware is settled in the system through mathematical calculate the overall value that is the output of the plate. The
equations with a specific value that can be implemented by the integral gain takes the past error and gets all the accumulative
software as shown in Fig. 5. errors to add it up to another variable then it will have limits to
avoid any integral wind-up as shown in (5). The derivative are added up and saved inside a variable that will drive the
gain is calculated in the same way of the integral gain but takes plant as shown in (7)
the difference of error between the recent and past one as in (6)
0
: 2 0
: 2
0: 2 7
B. GUI Interface
To test the proposed system with the electronic throttle, we
used the engine speed model in the MATLAB that operates by
The embedded system tunes the PID controller through the taking throttle plate angle (in degrees) as an input and, through
firmware by checking when the errors are calculated, and it the car mechanical system, it converts it to engine speed, as
will indicate the loaded values in the system. The output is shown in Fig. 6.
then calculated after the three gains are determined and they

Fig.6. Engine Speed model using MATLAB Simulink

We planted the PID control system in the Model to act as a
controller that will update the ECU to send the throttle angle
value and get a feedback from the engine as shown in 7.

Fig. 7. PID control system

V. SIMULATION RESULTS
The proposed system takes a signal input and converts it Fig. 8. Speed Model Linearization
into an angle position that limits the air flow through the
engine to control the rpm of the car. To create a relation
between the engine speed and the throttle position in degrees,
we generated a linearization of an “engine speed model”
through MATLAB to get the frequency values that operate the
rpm values of the car engine, as shown in Fig. 8.
We tested the values based on three coordinate locations
around the campus of the University of Central Oklahoma in
Edmond, Oklahoma. A google map picture that shows the
three test locations is shown in Fig. 9. The speed limit and the
coordinates of the three test locations are reported in Table 1.
Fig. 9. Test locations map around UCO campus
 Table 1. Test locations coordinates After tuning the PID controller, a spike in the throttle
plate position was noticed before the system settled down, as
Street no. Coordinates
in Fig. 12.
1 (45 mile/h) 35°39'27.3"N 97°28'41.9"W
2 (25 mile/h) 35°39'10.1"N 97°28'16.1"W
3 (60 mile/h) 35°39'30.1"N 97°28'30.2"W

To convert the speed limit values into rpm we used the

equation (8) [6]

Fig. 12. A spike in the throttle plate position was noticed

Where RPM is engine speed, r is the loaded tire radius,
R1 is the transmission gear ratio, and R2 is the rear axle ratio. By slowing the response time of the response, it reduced
the spike and the throttle command had an acceptable output
For example, by calculating the parameters of a 2005
without a spike in the system, as shown in Fig. 13.
Honda Civic HX, the 3rd gear combination has the gear ratio
of 1.241, the 4th gear is 0.970, and the differential drive is
4.412 [8]. The tire radius is 11 inches. Therefore, the values of
the RPM are 5020 RPM at 60 mile/hour, 3770 RPM at 45
mile/hour and 2090 RPM at 25 miles/hour. We simulated the
RPM values in the MATLAB to obtain the Throttle position
values in degrees.
After evaluating the throttle angular position values, we
implemented them in our GUI simulation to test the PID
system and tune the gain values. Considering no PID tuning,
the results of the desired and the actual engine speed (in RPM)
are illustrated in Fig. 10.
Fig. 13. An improved tuned throttle Step response

The tuned PID parameters simulated in the MATLAB are

used in the system as a new subsystem that will linearize the
values of the system, as shown in Fig. 14.

Fig. 10. Engine speed in RPM before tuning the PID

By tuning the PID controller to correct the overshoot and
the oscillation of the output of the system, the following PID
parameters are obtained, Kp = 0.006, Ki = 0.013, Kd =
0.00062 and N = 418.33 is a filter coefficient. The engine
speed in RPM after tuning the PID is shown in Fig. 11.

Fig. 14. Implemented controller system

We implemented the system in the GUI interface to

simulate our main system. By implementing the coordinates
of the vehicle location and using the maximum speed limit for
that location, the system has proven to limit the speed to the
maximum speed, as shown in Fig. 15

Fig. 11. Engine speed in RPM before tuning the PID

 Fig.15. GUI interface of the system simulation
The team is now working on implementing the system
VI. CONCLUSION and the hardware frame to road test it. This project aims to
This research paper presents an embedded smart cruise reduce car accidents and enhance the safety on the road.
control system to limit the vehicle speed to the maximum REFERENCES
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