Design of an Advanced Traction Controller for an Electric Vehicle Equipped with Four Direct Driven In-Wheel Motors

The vision for the future automotive chassis is to interconnect the lateral, longitudinal, and vertical dynamics by separately controlling driving, braking, steering, and damping of each individual wheel. A major advantage of all wheel drive electric vehicles with four in-wheel motors is the possibility to control the torque and speed at each wheel independently. This paper proposes a traction controller for such a vehicle. It estimates the road's adhesion potential at each wheel and adjusts each motor voltage, such that the longitudinal slip is kept in an optimal range. For development and validation, a full vehicle model is designed in ADAMS/View software, in co-simulation with motor and control elements, modeled in MATLAB/Simulink.