Coupling Control Strategy of Force and Displacement for Electric Differential Power Steering System of Electric Vehicle With Motorized Wheels

This paper presents a coupling control strategy of force and displacement for an electric differential power steering (EDPS) system to improve steering maneuverability and handling stability of electric vehicles with motorized wheels. In order to investigate mutual influences between vehicles and drivers, models of the EDPS system, the vehicle, the tire as well as the actuate motor are introduced. Then, by analyzing key factors that affect the interaction between vehicles and drivers, the optimum hand wheel torque of the EDPS system is developed and actualized by torque difference between two front wheels based on the H
₂
/ H
_∞
control method. In addition, a yaw rate control method is schemed to diminish the yaw moment interference to vehicles caused by the torque difference between two front wheels, and μ-synthesis theory is applied here to improve the yaw rate tracking performance as well as attenuate influences of system uncertainties and disturbances. Finally, simulations by MATLAB/Simulink and hardware-in-the-loop experiments based on dSPACE are conducted and effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is demonstrated by simulation and experiment results and numerical analyses.