Design and Validation of an MPC-based Torque Blending and Wheel Slip Control Strategy

This article presents a braking control algorithm for electric vehicles endowed with redundant actuators, i.e. friction brakes and wheel-individual electric motors. This algorithm relies on a model predictive control framework and is able to optimally split the wheel braking torque among the redundant actuators, while providing anti-lock braking features (i.e. wheel slip regulation). It will be shown that, the integration of these two control functions together with energy metrics, actuator constraints and dynamics improves the control performance compared to state-of-art control structures. Additionally, experimental measurements recorded with our prototype vehicle demonstrate a precise wheel slip regulation and high energy efficiency of the proposed braking control methodology.