Robust control for four wheel independently-actuated electric ground vehicles by external yaw-moment generation

This paper presents a robust controller for four wheel independently-actuated (FWIA) electric ground vehicles to preserve vehicle stability and improve vehicle handling performance. Thanks to the actuation flexibility of FWIA electric ground vehicles, an external yaw moment, which is usually employed to regulate the vehicle yaw and lateral motions, can be easily generated with the torque differences between the left and right side motors. A μ-synthesis control method which can deal with unmodeled dynamics and parametric uncertainties is proposed by taking the external yaw moment as the control input. Simulations with a high-fidelity, CarSim®, full-vehicle model are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control system. Simulation results in various driving scenarios with vehicle payload variations show the robustness of the proposed controller.w