Energy conserving vehicle motion control for electric vehicle equipped with multiple drive motors

This paper presents energy conserving vehicle motion control for electric vehicles equipped with different types of drive motors. The proposed controller, which minimizes total energy consumption in a vehicle, consists of guidance control and distribution control. In the guidance controller, optimized vehicle motion conserving energy consumption is generated using model predictive control. In the distribution controller, dissipation energy is minimized utilizing a redundant set of tire forces. By separating guidance and distribution control, the complexity of vehicle dynamics which is considered in nonlinear MPC is reduced, and computational load is also reduced. Effectiveness of the proposed energy conserving control is shown through the numerical simulation using a test course modeled an interchange; the energy conserving vehicle behavior is shown.