A handling and stability control algorithm for distributed drive electric vehicles

To improve the handling stability of a four wheel hub-motor independent drive, four-wheel steering-by-wire electric vehicle, a typical over-actuated system, an algorithm of pseudo inverse control allocation is proposed. By means of pseudo inverse control allocation with steering wheel angle and acceleration pedal travel given by driver as input, the algorithm exerts control over the rotation angles of front and rear wheels and the driving forces of four wheels. Under Matlab/Simulink simulation environment and based on 8 DOF nonlinear vehicle model, simulations are conducted on the algorithm proposed with both sinusoidal input and double lane change conditions and the results are compared to that with conventional control scheme. The results show that with the algorithm of pseudo inverse control allocation the vehicle performance of tracking driver's intention is enhanced and the stability of vehicle is improved.