Stability Control of Electric Vehicles with In-wheel Motors: a New Approach Using Soft Computing Techniques

Recently, mostly due to global warming concerns and high oil prices, electric vehicles have attracted a great deal of interest as an elegant solution to environmental and energy problems. In addition to the fact that electric vehicles have no tailpipe emissions and are more efficient than internal combustion engine vehicles, they represent more versatile platforms on which to apply advanced motion control techniques. The focus of this book is to develop effective control strategies to improve driving dynamics and safety based on the philosophy of individually monitoring and controlling the tire forces on each wheel. A two-passenger electric all-wheel-drive urban vehicle with four in-wheel motors and an active steering system is designed and developed in this work. Based on this platform, a number of different stability and traction control systems have been developed using soft computing techniques. Finally, these control systems are integrated with each other and the performance and effectiveness of each stability control system is evaluated and compared using some standard test maneuvers.