Title: Active steering control system for an independent wheel drive electric vehicle

Authors: Muhammad Arshad Khan; Muhammad Faisal Aftab; Ejaz Ahmad; Iljoong Youn

Addresses: School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, ReCAPT, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju, Gyeongnam 660-701, South Korea ' Department of Engineering Cybernetics, NTNU, Trondheim 7491, Norway ' School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, ReCAPT, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju, Gyeongnam 660-701, South Korea ' School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, ReCAPT, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju, Gyeongnam 660-701, South Korea

Abstract: This research presents an active steering control system (ASCS) for an independent wheel drive electric vehicle (EV). The ASCS will manoeuvre the independently actuated (IA) all-wheel drive (AWD) EV via coordinating the angular velocities of the four wheels plus active front steering (AFS). Due to the physical and mechanical limitations of the steering input in conventional AFS, the differential speed between left and right wheels of an IA EV is used to generate the additional steering effects. The proposed ASCS is a combination of forward speed and yaw rate controllers, designed using the robust H_∞ control methodology. The effectiveness of the proposed control system is analysed using a high-fidelity vehicle model by simulating different driving conditions and road disturbances cases. The simulation results indicate that the proposed system can significantly improve the vehicle performance by tracking the desired yaw rate and speed.

Keywords: differential steering control; AFS; active front steering; electric vehicle; four wheel drive; H_∞ control; nonlinear vehicle model; steering control; vehicle dynamics; yaw rate tracking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVD.2019.103597

International Journal of Vehicle Design, 2019 Vol.79 No.4, pp.273 - 291

Received: 10 Feb 2018
Accepted: 14 Sep 2018
Published online: 13 Nov 2019 *

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