Research on Integrated Chassis Control Strategy for Four-Wheel Independent Control Electric Vehicle

Four-wheel independent control electric vehicle is a new type of x-by-wire EV with four wheels independent steering and four wheels independent drive/brake systems. In order to take full advantage of the vehicle's performance potential, this paper presents a novel integrated chassis control strategy. In the paper, the strategy is designed by the hierarchical control structure and divided into integrated control layer and allocation layer. By this method, the control logical can be modularized and simplified. In the integrated control layer, Model Prediction Control (MPC) is adopted to design the integrated control unit, which belongs to be a kind of local optimization algorithm with feedback correction features. Using this method could avoid the system performance degradation caused by the control model mismatch. The control allocation layer is to optimally distribute the vehicle control forces to the steering/driving/brake actuators on each wheel. In order to maximize the use of the tire adhesions, the algorithm sets the tire load rate minimized as the control target. Finally, based on the four-wheels-independent vehicle dynamic model, the feasibility of the proposed integrated chassis control strategy is verified under the condition of step steering angle response with two different road adhesion coefficients.