A Study Of Controllability and Observability of Sequential Type Gearshift Mechanism

Faster and efficient gear shifts have always been the demand of automobile industry. Be it an automatic transmission having distinctly low efficiency or an automated manual transmission with combined benefits of automatic and manual gearboxes, the phenomenon of gear shift has always been the area of interest. Sequential type gear shift mechanisms have been increasingly employed in automated manual transmissions due to their suitability to readily available (rotary) actuators. However, there is a dearth of published literature addressing the issue of modeling the dynamics of the system and studying its controllability and observability. The objective of this proposal is to develop a model for the dynamics of Sequential type gearshift mechanism and to study the controllability and observability of the mechanism as a dynamic system. A mathematical model capable of catering the dynamics of the system is developed. The resulting mathematical model is used for state-space realization. The effect of various design parameters on the degree of controllability and observability of the mechanism is studied using gramians. In addition to this, output controllability, i.e. in this context the ability to achieve desired gearshift force given any initial state within a finite time, is also studied.