Lateral Stability Improvement of In-Wheel-Motor-Driven Electric Vehicles Using Gain-scheduled Robust Control

A robust gain-scheduled H-infinity controller is proposed to improve vehicle lateral stability and handling performance of in-wheel-motor-driven electric vehicles by managing the external yaw moment. To address uncertainties in vehicle lateral dynamics, uncertain factors such as tire cornering stiffness and vehicle mass are represented via the norm-bounded uncertainty, and then linear parameter-varying vehicle model is built, which depends affinely on the time-varying longitudinal velocity described via a polytope with finite vertices. Meanwhile, a hyper-trapezoidal polytope is applied to reduce conservative. In addition, the quadratic D-stability is also considered to enhance the transient response of the closed-loop system. In term of a set of linear matrix inequalities, the gain-scheduled H-infinity controller is finally completed. Simulations with a high-fidelity, CarSim (R), full-vehicle model verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller.