Coordination control for formation and lateral stability under constant speed of four-wheel independently driving electric vehicles

This paper presents a hierarchical control strategy for formation control of multiple four-wheel independently driving electric vehicles (4WIDEVs) under constant speed. The upper layer controller establishes formation mathematical model based on dynamic virtually leader-follower (DV-LF) method which transforms research for formation control into vehicle-following control and fuzzy PID algorithm is designed as vehicle following control strategy under constant speed. Considering the lateral stability of the following vehicle, the lower layer controller adopts torque distribution control strategy and the additional yaw moment controller is designed based on the static gain from the sideslip angle and yaw rate of the vehicle to improve the lateral stability in the process of forming the desired formation. In the end, in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed hierarchical control algorithm, the lane-change formation test condition under high constant speed is simulated in this paper and the simulation result shows that the coordination control strategy can achieve the desired formation control and improve the lateral stability of the following vehicle under high constant speed.