Robust Reconfgurable Control for In-wheel Electric Vehicles

The paper presents a fault tolerant reconfgurable control method for vehicles driven by four in-wheel electric motors and a steering system. The aim of the design is to realize robust velocity and road trajectory tracking even under challenging driving conditions or actuator failures. The vehicle is operated solely with the in-wheel motors, thus steering intervention is only applied in case of skidding or a failure of an electric motor. The reconfgurable control is realized based on Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) framework, using the specifc characteristics of the in-wheel motors of fast and accurate torque control. The operation of the designed control system is demonstrated in a CarSim simulation environment.