Adaptive slip vectoring for speed and yaw-rate control in electric vehicles with four in-wheel motors

Abstract

A non model-based control architecture, called adaptive slip vectoring, is presented to regulate speed and yaw-rate in a fully electric vehicle equipped with four in-wheel induction motors. The actuators redundancy is dealt with by a Slip Vectoring strategy which, given a driving force and a driving yaw-moment as control constraints, allocates optimal slip references to each tire, so that four speed references are provided to the four in-wheel motors on the basis of vehicle accelerations, speed and yaw-rate regulation errors. In order to drive independently each in-wheel motor speed to its reference, a decentralized feedback control loop is designed which leads to exponentially convergent load torque estimates so that the torque–slip operating conditions can be monitored online and the load torque requirements are matched for each tire. As a result four decentralized current-pair reference inputs are provided to each motor. Structural sufficient conditions for local exponential stability of the speed and yaw-rate regulation are obtained for uniform rectilinear references. A new overall stability index is introduced and monitored online, and an automatic longitudinal speed reduction can be performed with the goal of keeping such a stability index within a predetermined range so that the structural sufficient conditions are met. Realistic CarSim simulations are presented: (i) a snowy uphill path illustrates the non model-based speed reduction driven by the stability index monitoring; (ii) standard moose-test maneuvers on dry and wet asphalt illustrate uniform yaw-rate tracking performance due to the continuous differential actions of the four in-wheel torques.