Combined Control Allocation and Sliding Mode Control in the Dynamic Control of a Vehicle with Eight In-Wheel Motors

An eight wheel independently driving steering (8WIDBS) electric vehicle is studied in this paper. The vehicle is equipped with eight in-wheel motors and a steer-by-wire system. A hierarchically coordinated vehicle dynamic control (HCVDC) system, including a high-level vehicle motion controller, a control allocation, an inverse tire model and a lower-level slip/slip angle controller, is proposed for the over-actuated vehicle system. The high-level sliding mode vehicle motion controller is designed to produce desired total forces and yaw moment, distributed to longitudinal and lateral forces of each tire by an advanced control allocation method. And the slip controller is designed to use a sliding mode control method to follow the desired slip ratios by manipulating the corresponding in-wheel motor torques. Evaluation of the overall system is accomplished by sine maneuver simulation. Simulation results confirm that the proposed control system can coordinate among the redundant and constrained actuators to achieve the vehicle dynamic control task and improve the vehicle stability.