Design of a comprehensive chassis control system for a distributed drive electric vehicle

A comprehensive chassis control system based on CAN bus is designed for a distributed-drive electric vehicle with four-wheel steering-by-wire and hydraulic brake in this paper. The control system consists of a vehicle controller, four wheel drive controllers, a steering system controller and a braking system controller. The controllers of electric vehicle communicate via CAN bus and the application layer protocol of CAN network is designed based on CAN 2.0B protocol. The hardware of controllers is designed with consideration of the effects of electromagnetic interference, temperature changes, vibration and other factors of electric vehicle. A pseudo inverse control allocation algorithm for electric vehicle is created, which can not only fulfill routine control allocation, but also achieve control reallocation in the cases of control system faults and control input saturation, hence improving the controllability and stability of vehicle. The results of simulation and verification test show that the control system designed can effectively allocate and reallocate the control input of actuator and make electric vehicle well realize the intention of driver with stability of vehicle maintained.