DYC Design for Autonomous Distributed Drive Electric Vehicle Considering Tire Nonlinear Mechanical Characteristics in the PWA Form

This paper presents a novel direct yaw moment control (DYC) strategy for autonomous distributed drive electric vehicle (DDEV) to improve path-following driving stability under critical maneuvers. Due to the fact that the tire mechanical characteristics show highly nonlinear under those critical conditions, the piecewise affine (PWA) identification method is chosen in this work to model the tire nonlinear mechanical characteristics since it shows best model accuracy/simplicity compromise for system control design. On this basis, to properly reflect the coupling behaviors between longitudinal motion and lateral motion, the vehicle dynamics model which considers the tire nonlinear mechanical characteristics in the PWA form is established. By analyzing the phase plane of vehicle nonlinear model, a novel external yaw moment calculation method based on global fast terminal sliding mode (GFTSM) control method is applied to the upper layer of DYC architecture for eliminating the errors of yaw rate and sideslip angle. Then, different weight coefficients are allocated to obtain the final external yaw moment. In the lower controller, the optimal four-wheel torque is distributed according to a concise and accurate algorithm in which adaptive weight coefficients are considered. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy in improving the driving stability performance of autonomous DDEV against two other control strategies under three extreme conditions.