Advanced Vertical and Lateral Coupling Dynamics Control for a Four In-wheel Motor Drive Electric Vehicle

This paper presents an advanced vertical and lateral coupling dynamics control for stabilizing the vertical and lateral motion of a four in-wheel motor drive electric vehicle. The novelty is to investigate the possibilities of enhancing the lateral stability of electric vehicle through the correct control of their suspension system, and further improve the suspension system performances using direct yaw control (DYC) without having a contradictory effect between the vertical and lateral controllers. There are two main objectives; the first is to improve ride comfort, road holding and vehicle lateral handling performance simultaneously by using a new combined full vehicle suspension system, and the second is to strengthen electric vehicle lateral handling performance by using a sliding mode technique for controlling the direct yaw moment. For vehicle suspension system control, we are seeking to design a skyhook control to control the suspension damper and a sliding mode control to stabilize the position of the sprung masses of the in-wheel damper vibration absorber (DVA). To solve the problems caused by the chattering phenomena and ensure the exponential stability of the sprung mass, the continuous singular terminal sliding-mode controller is selected to design the sliding mode control used as a DVA controller. Simulation results show that the coordinated control between DYC and combined full vehicle suspension system under several turns' maneuvers and under random road excitations, can stabilize electric vehicle lateral motion, enhance the vehicle ride comfort, road holding, enhance the rollover resistance performance and satisfy the main suspension performances simultaneously.