Coordinated control for path-following of an autonomous four in-wheel motor drive electric vehicle

Coordination of Active Front Steering (AFS) and Direct Yaw Moment Control (DYC) has been widely used for non-autonomous vehicle lateral stability control. Recently, some researchers used it (AFS/DYC) for path-following of autonomous vehicles. However, current controllers are not robust enough with respect to uncertainties and different road conditions to guarantee lateral stability of Autonomous Four In-wheel Motor Drive Electric Vehicles. Thus, a coordinated control is proposed to address this issue. In this paper, a two-layer hierarchical control strategy is utilized. In the upper-layer, a self-tunable super-twisting sliding mode control is utilized to deal with parametric uncertainties, and a Model Predictive Control (MPC) is used in order to allocate the control action to each AFS and DYC. Parametric uncertainties of tires’ cornering stiffness, vehicle mass and moment of inertia are considered. Simulations with different road conditions for path-following scenario have been conducted in MATLAB/Simulink. An autonomous vehicle equipped with Four In-wheel Motor and two degrees of freedom vehicle dynamics model is used in this study. In the end, the performance of the proposed controller is compared with the MPC controller. Simulation results reveal that the proposed controller provides better path-following in comparison with the MPC controller.