Coordinated Control of Path Following and Yaw Stability for Distributed Drive Autonomous Vehicle

Abstract

Abstract This paper researches a coordinated control approach of path following and yaw motion stability for distributed drive autonomous electric vehicle. In the upper-level controller, a linear time-varying model predictive control algorithm is used to obtain the front wheel steering angle to guarantee the vehicle to drive along the planned path. Meanwhile, the sliding mode control theory is aimed to calculate the external yaw moment to ensure the vehicle yaw stability. In the low-level controller, this research proposes the particle swarm optimization algorithm to execute the torque distribution control. The Matlab/Simulink simulation results indicate that the coordinated control strategy can not only effectively improve the accuracy of path following, but also guarantee yaw motion stability of the autonomous vehicles.