Deep reinforcement learning based active safety control for distributed drive electric vehicles

Abstract Distributed drive electric vehicles are regarded as the promising transportation due to the advanced power flow architecture. Optimizing the yaw motion to enhance vehicle safety is a challenging job. Besides, the nonlinear features in vehicles affect the control accuracy of the yaw motion controllers. To this end, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based direct yaw moment control (DYC) strategy is put forward here. Vehicle dynamics can be approximated with the DRL algorithm, which reduces the complex nonlinear solving process. Concretely, the DYC problem is formulated as Markov Decision Process in which the observed signals and external yaw moment are incorporated as the state and action sets. Thereupon, actor‐critic network is exhibited to approximate action‐value function and policy function for better control performance. Furthermore, to guarantee the continuous solution of external yaw moment, the deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm is employed, in which target and online network parameters are simultaneously trained to maintain learning process stability. The proposed DRL based DYC strategy is verified using the Carsim/Simulink platform under the typical lane change manoeuvres. Numerical test results demonstrate that the proposed DYC strategy outperforms the linear approaches on taking full advantage of understeer features and enhancing the lateral stability, especially under the critical steering manoeuvres.