Minimum-Time Path-Following for Highly Redundant Electric Vehicles

Modern electric vehicles are most often designed with actuator redundancy and in-wheel propulsion, a combination that appears particularly suitable for the design of motion controllers that can optimally blend multiple objectives, such as dynamic, safety and driver-oriented. This paper considers such a technological setting and concentrates on the design of a path-following algorithm with minimum-time features, with the aim of combining performance and energy-oriented optimization of the vehicle motion. Specifically, an approximate minimum-time trajectory is obtained by appropriate convexification of the resulting optimization problem. The effectiveness of the approach is assessed by means of simulation tests carried out on the CarSim vehicle simulation environment.