Simultaneous Lateral Stability and Energy Efficiency Control of Over-Actuated Electric Vehicles

A hierarchical controller is proposed for simultaneous lateral stability and energy efficiency control of over-actuated electric vehicles (EVs). Particularly, the designed controller consists of an upper-level lateral stability controller and a lower-level torque control allocation (CA) controller. At the upper-level, the stability control problem is formulated as a constrained tracking problem based on a reference model, and solved by a model predictive control (MPC) method. At the lower-level, a torque CA strategy based on the efficiency function of the in-wheel motor of EVs is proposed to decrease the energy consumption with guaranteed lateral stability. Compared with a holistic approach, solving the problem hierarchically reduces the computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed hierarchical controller in lane change scenarios with different road friction-coefficients.