Coordinated vehicle traction control based on engine torque and brake pressure under complicated road conditions

Abstract

Vehicle traction control system has been developed to enhance the traction capability and the direction stability of the driving wheels through the tyre slip ratio regulation. Under normal situations, if the tyre slip ratio exceeds a certain threshold, the slip ratio of the driving wheel is regulated by the coupled interaction of the engine torque and the active brake pressure. In order to obtain the best driving performance on a road under complicated friction conditions, the driving torque and the active brake pressure, need to be decoupled and adjusted to avoid penalisation of each other. In this paper, a coordinated cascade control method with two sliding-mode variable structure controllers is presented. In this control method, the driving wheel slip ratio is regulated by adjusting the engine torque and the wheel brake pressure. Through the sliding-mode controller, the engine torque is tuned to achieve the maximum driving acceleration and then the active brake pressure is applied to the slipped wheel for further modification of the wheel slip ratio. The advantage of this control method is that through proper regulation, the conflict between the two control inputs could be avoided. Finally, the simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.