Driving and Steering Coordination Control for 4WID/4WIS Electric Vehicle

This paper presents an integrated chassis controller with multiple hierarchical layers for 4WID/4WIS electric vehicle. The proposed systematic design consists of the following four parts: 1) a reference model is in the driver control layer, which maps the relationship between the driver's inputs and the desired vehicle motion. 2) a sliding mode controller is in the vehicle motion control layer, whose objective is to keep the vehicle following the desired motion commands generated in the driver control layer. 3) By considering the tire adhesive limits, a tire force allocator is in the control allocation layer, which optimally distributes the generalized forces/moments to the four wheels so as to minimize the tire workloads during normal driving. 4) an actuator controller is in the executive layer, which calculates the driving torques of the in-wheel motors and steering angles of the four wheels in order to finally achieve the distributed tire forces. Experimental verification is made to show that the proposed integrated chassis controller is able to improve the vehicle's stability and handling performance through coordinating the steering and driving systems.