Backstepping Control of an Electric Vehicle with Local Control Saturation

For linear systems, the most used method to impose safety limitations on a control signal is to implement nonlinear saturation function into the controller. An anti-windup strategy is classically used to avoid an error accumulation of the integral term of the controller. However, the system stability is difficult to be ensured in this limitation case. Backstepping control deduces stable control laws for most classes of strict feedback nonlinear systems. This paper deals with the backstepping control of an electric vehicle considering the operational limits of the traction system. Energetic Macroscopic Representation is used to organize the backstepping control. The combination of EMR and backstepping control allows taking into account the system limits while ensuring its stability. This results in an original anti-windup strategy developed though the Lyapunov theories. The proposed control has been validated by simulation for an acceleration test with the powertrain limits.