Coordinated Longitudinal and Lateral Motion Control for Four Wheel Independent Motor-Drive Electric Vehicle

For four wheel independent motor-drive electric vehicle, the vehicle longitudinal and lateral motion can be controlled by distributing the driving and regenerative braking torques of four wheel motors. To meet the driving command of driver and keep the vehicle lateral stability, a hierarchical control system is proposed in this paper. In the upper layer, a nonlinear model predictive control is implemented to solve the nonlinear multiinput multioutput, over-actuated problem. The controller is based on a nonlinear three degree-of-freedom model with nonlinear tire model, considering wheel slips as virtual control input. In the lower layer, the wheel slips are manipulated by a PID controller for generating driving and regenerative braking torques of the independent motors. This proposed controller is tested in a hardware-in-the-loop system with four typical maneuvers, which are constant velocity, accelerating, decelerating, and low road adhesion coefficient situations to show different driver command. The results show that the driver command of longitudinal and lateral motion control are both satisfied.