Wheel Modules With Distributed Controllers: A Multi-Agent Approach to Vehicular Control

Modular vehicles have great potential to solve future mobility challenges in an efficient, reliable, and flexible way. Various designs have been proposed for compact, and multi-functional wheel modules. However, the architecture of vehicular active safety systems, by adopting such a modular approach, has not yet been well studied in the literature. Conventional stability control systems are developed in a centralized manner to seek the optimal distribution of control efforts, and the resultant controllers are highly dependent on the vehicle platform. Any changes to the actuators as well as modelling complexity will lead to a system redesign. This paper proposes a distributed control architecture as inspired by the modular chassis design for great re-usability. Each wheel module is treated as an agent in a cooperative game to determine their share in the overall control efforts, while encapsulating their configuration as well as modelling details within each module. Re-configurable agent models are also derived in a weak-coupled fashion to enhance modularity of the control system. The resultant distributed model predictive controller demonstrates greater flexibility in adaption to various configurations as well as enhanced robustness against computational units failure in the system. The proposed architecture also offers a new perspective for the controller design of conventional vehicles.