A novel IMC-FOF design for four wheel steering systems of distributed drive electric vehicles

Abstract

To improve handling and stability for distributed drive electric vehicles (DDEV), the study on four wheel steering (4WS) systems can improve the vehicle driving performance through enhancing the tracking capability to desired vehicle state. Most previous controllers are either a large amount of calculation, or requires a lot of experimental data, these are relatively time-consuming and laborious. According to the front and rear wheel steering angle of DDEV can be distributed independently, a novel controller named internal model controller with fractional-order filter (IMC-FOF) for 4WS systems is proposed and studied in this paper. The IMC-FOF is designed using the internal model control theory and compared with IMC and PID controller. The influence of time constant and fractional-order parameters which is optimized using quantum genetic algorithms (QGA) on tracking ability of vehicle state are also analyzed. Using a production vehicle as an example, the simulation is performed combining Matlab/Simulink and CarSim. The comparison results indicated that the proposed controller presents performance to distribute the front and rear wheel steering angle for ensuring better tracking capability to desired vehicle state, meanwhile it possesses strong robustness.