Direct yaw moment control for electric and hybrid vehicles with independent motors

Direct yaw moment control is an effective means to enhance vehicle stability and handling. The majority of the latest direct yaw moment control works employ sliding mode control to generate the target yaw moment. In this paper, a new sliding mode-based direct yaw moment control method is proposed for electric and hybrid vehicles equipped with independent motors. This method employs a novel switching function design to simultaneously track the desired yaw rate and vehicle side-slip. Comparative simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional direct yawmoment control method in terms of tracking the reference yaw rate, vehicle path and vehicle side-slip in various challenging driving scenarios. © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.