Design of electric differential system for an electric vehicle with dual wheel motors

This paper proposes an electric differential system (EDS) for an electric vehicle (EV) driven directly by dual motors in the rear wheels. This system consists of twofold control loops: the outer loop modulates the yaw motion of the vehicle, and the inner loop improves the robustness against system uncertainties and road conditions. In experiments, the inner control loop is constructed by using MATLAB®/Simulink® software performed on a laptop, while the outer control loop is realized with an EPF10KE field programmable gate array (FPGA) in the fixed-point arithmetic format. The effectiveness of the proposed EDS is successfully demonstrated by a straight-line test with a commercial vehicle, which is reconstructed to be driven directly by two rear wheel motors.