Electric Differential for an Electric Vehicle with 4WD/2WS Ability

Using an electric differential (ED) in an electric vehicle (EV) has many advantages. Flexibility and direct torque control of the wheels during cornering and risky maneuvers are some of these advantages. In spite of its reported advantages and successes, the ED has several problems limits its applicability, for example, an increment of control loops and an increase of computational effort. In this paper, an ED for an EV with four independent driven motors and two wheels steering ability is proposed. The proposed ED is easy to implement and hasn’t the problems of previous EDs. Improved Fictitious Master technique is used to synchronization, and an adaptive desired wheel speed is computed by using the Ackerman principle. The proposed ED is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink software and the operation of the system is evaluated under perturbed condition and curve and straight path tracking. The simulation results indicate that the proposed ED ensures both reliability and good path tracking.