Smooth gear-change control for EV Clutchless Automatic Manual Transmission

Electric vehicles (EV) equipped with automatic manual transmission (AMT) offer many advantages in terms of transmission efficiency, improvement of driving comfort, and shifting quality. Conventional AMT for vehicles powered by internal combustion engine (ICE) requires an electronic controlled clutch to separate/engage engine power for gear change smoothly, because of high inertia of the ICE. This complicates the system and thus raises higher cost. Hence, a Clutchless Automatic Manual Transmission (CLAMT) with the advantages of high efficiency, low cost, and simple structure is adopted and developed in this paper. The objective of this article is focused on gear-change control technique of CLAMT, including model parameters identification, synchronization speed control during gear engagement and motion control of gear-change actuated mechanism. Through theoretical analysis, simulation, as well as experimental verification, the results confirm that the designed control technique is able to make smoothly gear-shifting and the feasibility of CLAMT is verified.