Coordination of Vehicle Motion and Energy Management Control Systems for Wheel Motor Driven Vehicles

This paper shows how smooth coordination of vehicle motion controller and energy management can be achieved when control allocation is used for over-actuated ground vehicles. The ground vehicle studied here is equipped with four electric wheel motors, four disc brakes, and front and rear steering. This gives a total of ten input signals to control the desired vehicle motion in longitudinal-, lateral-, and yaw-direction. Simulations show that the desired input signals from energy management and steering can be fulfilled, but when needed the actual input signals for the motion actuators are smoothly diverted from the desired input signals due to vehicle stability reasons and/or saturation of the actuators.