An intelligent approach to the lateral forces usage in controlling the vehicle yaw rate

A direct yaw moment control system (DYC) is designed to improve the handling and stability of a four-wheel-drive electric vehicle. The main task of this paper is to use the lateral forces in the process of optimally controlling vehicle stability. This is performed by defining a variable optimum region for the slip ratio of each wheel. A hierarchical structure is selected to design the control system. The higher-level control system controls the yaw rate of the vehicle based on the fuzzy logic technique. The lower-level control system, installed in each wheel, maintains the slip ratio of the same wheel within an optimum region using the fuzzy logic technique. This optimum region for each wheel is continuously modified based on the impact of the lateral force on the generated control yaw moment and the friction coefficient of the road. Therefore, an algorithm for estimation of the friction coefficient is proposed. Computer simulations are carried out to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed method. This is accomplished by comparison of the results of control methods with a fixed slip ratio region and the results of the proposed method with a variable slip ratio region in some maneuvers. The robustness of the proposed controller against hard braking and noise contamination, as well as the effect of steering wheel angle amplitude, is verified. The simulation results show that the influence of the proposed method on enhancing vehicle performance is significant. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society