dc.description.abstract |
The study of chassis control has been a major research area in the automotive industry
and academia for more than fifty years now. Among the popular methods used to actively
control the dynamics of a vehicle, torque vectoring, the method of controlling both the
direction and the magnitude of the torque on the wheels, is of particular interest. Such a
method can alter the vehicle’s behaviour in a positive way under both sub-limit and limit
handling conditions and has become even more relevant in the case of an electric vehicle
equipped with multiple electric motors.
Torque vectoring has been so far employed mainly in lateral vehicle dynamics control
applications, with the longitudinal dynamics of the vehicle remaining under the full
authority of the driver. Nevertheless, it has been also recognised that active control of
the longitudinal dynamics of the vehicle can improve vehicle stability in limit handling
situations. A characteristic example of this is the case where the driver misjudges the
entry speed into a corner and the vehicle starts to deviate from its path, a situation commonly
referred to as a ‘terminal understeer’ condition. Use of combined longitudinal and
lateral control in such scenarios have been already proposed in the literature, but these
solutions are mainly based on heuristic approaches that also neglect the strong coupling
of longitudinal and lateral dynamics in limit handling situations.
The main aim of this project is to develop a real-time implementable multivariable
control strategy to stabilise the vehicle at the limits of handling in an optimal way using
torque vectoring via the two independently controlled electric motors on the rear axle of
an electric vehicle. To this end, after reviewing the most important contributions in the
control of lateral and/or longitudinal vehicle dynamics with a particular focus on the limit
handling solutions, a realistic vehicle reference behaviour near the limit of lateral acceleration
is derived. An unconstrained optimal control strategy is then developed for terminal
understeer mitigation. The importance of constraining both the vehicle state and the control
inputs when the vehicle operates at the limits of handling is shown by developing
a constrained linear optimal control framework, while the effect of using a constrained
nonlinear optimal control framework instead is subsequently examined next. Finally an
optimal estimation strategy for providing the necessary vehicle state information to the
proposed optimal control strategies is constructed, assuming that only common vehicle
sensors are available. All the developed optimal control strategies are assessed not only
in terms of performance but also execution time, so to make sure they are implementable
in real time on a typical Electronic Control Unit. |
en_UK |