Coordinated control for path-following of an autonomous four in-wheel motor drive electric vehicle

Abstract

Coordination of Active Front Steering (AFS) and Direct Yaw Moment Control (DYC) has been widely used for non-autonomous vehicle lateral stability control. Recently, some researchers used it (AFS/DYC) for path-following of autonomous vehicles. However, current controllers are not robust enough with respect to uncertainties and different road conditions to guarantee lateral stability of Autonomous Four In-wheel Motor Drive Electric Vehicles. Thus, a coordinated control is proposed to address this issue. In this paper, a two-layer hierarchical control strategy is utilized. In the upper-layer, a self-tunable super-twisting sliding mode control is utilized to deal with parametric uncertainties, and a Model Predictive Control (MPC) is used in order to allocate the control action to each AFS and DYC. Parametric uncertainties of tires’ cornering stiffness, vehicle mass and moment of inertia are considered. Simulations with different road conditions for path-following scenario have been conducted in MATLAB/Simulink. An autonomous vehicle equipped with Four In-wheel Motor and two degrees of freedom vehicle dynamics model is used in this study. In the end, the performance of the proposed controller is compared with the MPC controller. Simulation results reveal that the proposed controller provides better path-following in comparison with the MPC controller.

Path Tracking Control with Constraint on Tire Slip Angles under Low-Friction Road Conditions

“…In this paper, a low friction road condition means that µ is 0.4 or less. FWS, 4WID, 4WIB 0.3 [27] In Table 1, δ f , δ r , ∆F x and ∆M z are the control inputs, which represent the front and rear steering angles, the control longitudinal force, and the control yaw moment, respectively. An input configuration is composed of those control inputs.…”

Path following control for 4WID-EV based on extended state observer and sliding mode control considering yaw stability

“…The control algorithm mentioned above is aimed at ordinary autonomous vehicles. For 4WID-EV, LQR, 14 MPC, [15][16][17][18] and SMC 19 have also been widely adopted in recent years. Through the analysis and summary of previous research results, we found that during the path following process, a vehicle's stability was becoming more and more important compared with the accuracy of the path following process in recent literatures.…”

“…Among all these control strategies, there are two basic control frameworks, including the centralized framework 15,[17][18][19]21,22 and the distributed framework, 16,23 as illustrated by Figure 1(a) and (b). The hierarchical path following control system shown in Figure 1(a) is a system with two controllers, namely upper-level and lower-level controllers.…”

Integrated control method for path tracking and lateral stability of distributed drive electric vehicles with extended Kalman filter–based tire cornering stiffness estimation

“…In recent years, distributed drive electric vehicles have attracted more and more attention due to their unique advantages such as independent controllable motor, easy realization of each electronic control system, and high drive efficiency (Ahmad et al, 2022; Barari et al, 2022; Bingül and Yıldız, 2023; Guo et al, 2020; Salmani et al, 2022). With the development of computer calculation, sensor measurement, and vehicle control technology, these unique advantages have great potential in improving safety and driving efficiency in intelligent transportation systems.…”

“…In addition to various constraints in the desired path tracking process, the adaptability of vehicle model parameters is crucial to path tracking control method, especially tire cornering stiffness. At present, the robustness of the controller to uncertain parameters is insufficient, and the lateral stability of the distributed drive electric vehicle cannot be guaranteed, mainly because the nonlinear factors of the tire force are not considered when designing the lateral stability controller (Barari et al, 2022; Ji et al, 2018; Zhang et al, 2019). Due to the influence of road adhesion coefficient and vertical load, there exists a complex nonlinear relationship between tire force and cornering angle (Han et al, 2018).…”