A joystick driving algorithm with a collision stop feature on an electric vehicle (Cycab)

In this paper, we develop a joystick manual driving algorithm for an electric vehicle called Cycab. Cycab is developed as a public transportation vehicle, which can be driven either by a manual joystick or an automated driving mode. The vehicle uses six motors for driving four wheels, and front/rear steerings. Cycab utilizes one industrial PC with a real time Linux kernel and four Motorola MPC555 micro controllers, and a CAN network for the communication between the five processors. The developed algorithm consists of a torque distribution algorithm for the traction motors neglecting the joystick command and two automatic vehicle speed control algorithms for normal and emergency situations, that override the drivers Joystick command. In this study, the algorithm is developed using SynDEx, which is a system level CAD software dedicated to rapid prototyping and optimizing the implementation of real-time embedded applications on distributed architectures. The experimental results verify the usefulness of the developed algorithm.