Coordinated control and torque distribution of differential steering and anti-skid driving of distributed drive electric vehicle considering stability

Differential steering is a unique steering technology for distributed drive vehicles, which cannot only be applied to steering power, but also be used as a backup steering scheme for distributed drive vehicles. When the road adhesion conditions are poor, differential steering will lead to wheel slip, reduce the tire lateral force margin, and then affect the vehicle stability. To solve this issue, it is necessary to integrate the differential steering and anti-skid drive control. In this paper, the four-wheel distributed drive electric vehicle (DDEV), tire and wheel dynamics models are firstly established. Then the coordinated control strategy is proposed for anti-skid driving and differential steering of DDEV, where a neural network is adopted for the weights regulation of the two controllers. Next, an improved slip rate estimation method avoiding the calculation of vehicle speed is proposed which can reduce the error when the wheel angular acceleration is less than zero. Then, the slip rate fuzzy threshold controller is designed to control the wheel slip rate, and the feed forward-feedback differential torque controller is designed to obtain the differential torque required in steering. Considering the vehicle stability, the torque distribution adopts the quadratic programing method and combines the constraints of wheel slip rate and tire load rate to optimize the distribution of each wheel’s driving torque. Finally, the joint simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed improved slip rate estimation method and control strategy. The results show that the calculation error is reduced to 5.13% with the improved slip rate estimation results, and the superiority of proposed control method is verified by both simulation and HIL test.