Composite Control Design for In-Wheel Drive Electric Vehicle with Unknown Disturbances and Input Delay

This paper focuses on lateral motion stability con-trol of an in-wheel drive electric vehicle while accounting for un-known external disturbances and input time delay. A predictive sliding mode control using super twisting techniques is designed to mitigate the consequences of input time delay, tracking inac-curacy, and chattering phenomenon. Further, to degrade the lumped disturbances, a disturbance observer (DOB) is empha-sized to estimate unknown disturbances and facilitate feedfor-ward compensation for control. Then, a composite control structure combining predictive super-twisting sliding mode control (STSMC) and DOB is proposed to realize precise tracking uti-lizing appropriate disturbance estimation. To prove the closed-loop stability, a Lyapunov function-based analysis is performed. Simulation is carried out in MATLAB/Simulink to validate the proposed control, and two critical maneuvers are presented to demonstrate its effectiveness.