Electronic differential for electric vehicle with single wheel reference

This paper presents technique of implementing an electronic differential system (ED) for a rear wheel driven electric vehicle (EV) using DC motors. The system uses one of the front wheel speed and angle as reference for calculation of the velocity of the other wheels. The system consists of a shaft encoder that has been used to measure the angular speed of the wheel motors. A microcontroller based control approach is implemented to provide the rotational speeds of both wheel motors according to different vehicle speeds and steering angles. The effectiveness of the control method is validated using experimental data. The preliminary result shows that the proposed system can effectively work at different turning angles during cornering.