Coordinated Longitudinal and Lateral Motion Control for Distributed Drive Electric Vehicles With Mechanical Elastic Wheels

The distributed drive electric vehicle (DDEV) with active front wheel steering (AFS) is an over-actuated system. For such a system, more optimization targets should be considered to make the system better in addition to meeting the driving command of drivers and keeping the vehicle stable. The slip energy generated by excessive tire slipping reduces the utilization of the output energy of the motor, resulting in a reduction of electric vehicle (EV) mileage. In order to improve the vehicle performance, a coordinated longitudinal and lateral controller is designed for DDEV with mechanical elastic wheels (MEWs). The motion control layer of the hierarchical controller adopts the integral sliding mode control (ISMC) to determine the desired longitudinal force, lateral force, and yaw moment as virtual inputs of the vehicle. Then, a novel tire force distribution strategy is proposed to dynamically assign the virtual inputs among front wheels and four motors with the goal of optimizing the vehicle stability and longitudinal tire slip energy dissipation. To characterize tire slip energy more accurately, the brush model matching MEW is deduced in the combined slip conditions. The proposed controller is evaluated on the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test platform under different driving conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that this controller not only ensures the vehicle handling stability performance, but also improves the utilization of motor output energy and reduces tire wear.