Differential Speed Steering Control for Four-Wheel Distributed Electric Vehicle

In order to perform differential control instead of the mechanical differential and improve the steering performance of distributed electric vehicles, a two-level differential speed steering control strategy is proposed. Firstly, an upper-layer controller to track the yaw rate is designed based on PID feedback and 3-D lookup table model, which could shorten the response time and reduce the impact of model parameters mismatch. Then, in order to improve the robustness to external disturbances and parameter uncertainties, a lower-layer controller to track the wheel speed is proposed based on integral sliding mode control. Moreover, three simulations are conducted to validate the proposed strategy. The first simulation results indicate that the driving torques of the inner and outer wheels are distributed properly to avoid wheel slip. In the second simulation, when the conventional steering system fails, the proposed control strategy could avoid vehicle losing steering function. The last simulation results show that the differential speed steering control could be superimposed on the conventional steering system to improve the steering performance. Eventually, real-time simulation results verify the feasibility of the differential speed steering control.