Stability control of electric vehicles with four independently actuated wheels

A vehicle stability control approach for four-wheel independently actuated (4WIA) electric vehicles is presented. The proposed control method consists of a higher-level controller and a lower-level controller. Due to the possible modeling error and parametric uncertainties, an adaptive control based higher-level controller is designed to yield the vehicle virtual control efforts. The lower-level controller allocates the required control efforts to the four in-wheel motors for generating the desired tire forces. An analytic solution on how to distribute the higher-level control efforts is given, when the actuators constraints are not considered. Simulations based on a high-fidelity, CarSim^®, full-vehicle model show the effectiveness of the control approach.