Improvement in the vehicle stability of distributed-drive electric vehicles based on integrated model-matching control

This paper presents a vehicle dynamic stability controller for distributed-drive electric vehicles. A hierarchical control structure is adopted for the proposed controller. An upper controller is designed on the basis of integrated model-matching control. It consists of a feedforward component plus a feedback component to calculate the desired external yaw moment to achieve the desired vehicle motion. The feedforward control aims at compensating the effect caused by the variation in the linear cornering stiffnesses of the tyres during the life cycle of the tyres. It provides a rapid response under common driving conditions. The linear cornering stiffnesses of the tyres are estimated in real time by the adaptive forgetting-factor recursive least-squares method. Since many vehicle parameters have strongly non-linear and time-varying characteristics, adaptive sliding mode control is used as the feedback component to make the controller robust against systematic uncertainties. To combine the outputs of feedforward and feedback together and to avoid probable conflict, a weight gain coefficient is obtained. Additionally, a conventional sliding-mode controller is introduced as a comparative upper control strategy. The lower controller is utilized to allocate the required yaw moment and traction to the four independent motors, taking into account the tyre grip margins. Simulations for a low-g manoeuvre and a high-g manoeuvre are carried out to evaluate the proposed control algorithm. The results show that the proposed vehicle stability controller can significantly stabilize the vehicle motion and greatly reduce the driver's workload in comparison with with the conventional sliding-mode controller.