Integrated chassis control for a three-axle electric bus with distributed driving motors and active rear steering system

ABSTRACT

This paper describes an integrated chassis control framework for a novel three-axle electric bus with active rear steering (ARS) axle and four motors at the middle and rear wheels. The proposed integrated framework consists of four parts: (1) an active speed limiting controller is designed for anti-body slip control and rollover prevention; (2) an ARS controller is designed for coordinating the tyre wear between the driving wheels; (3) an inter-axle torque distribution controller is designed for optimal torque distribution between the axles, considering anti-wheel slip and battery power limitations and (4) a data acquisition and estimation module for collecting the measured and estimated vehicle states. To verify the performances, a simulation platform is established in Trucksim software combined with Simulink. Three test cases are particularly designed to show the performances. The proposed algorithm is compared with a simple even control algorithm. The test results show satisfactory lateral stability and rollover prevention performances under severe steering conditions. The desired tyre wear coordinating performance is also realised, and the wheel slip ratios are restricted within stable region during intensive driving and emergency braking with complicated road conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Electric bus
• distributed driving
• active rear steering
• speed limiting control
• tyre wear
• torque distribution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is partly supported by the International Cooperation Program supported by Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (2015DFE72810). And it is also partly supported by China ScholarshipCouncil and theDoctoralThesisBreeding Fund of Beijing Institute of Technology.