An Adaptive Hierarchical Trajectory Following Control Approach of Autonomous Four-Wheel Independent Drive Electric Vehicles

This paper deals with the trajectory following control problem of a class of autonomous vehicles with parametric uncertainties, external disturbances, and over-actuated features. A novel adaptive hierarchical control framework is proposed to supervise the lateral motion of autonomous four-wheel independent drive electric vehicles. First, an adaptive sliding mode high-level control law with the linear matrix inequality-based switching surface is designed to produce a vector of front steering angle and external yaw moment, in which the uncertain term and the switching control gain are adaptively regulated by the fuzzy logic technique, to further moderate the chattering phenomenon, an adaptive boundary layer is introduced. Second, a pseudo-inverse low-level control allocation algorithm is presented to optimally allocate the external yaw moment via coordinating and reconstructing the tire longitudinal forces. Finally, numerical simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive control approach has outstanding tracking performance.