An Intelligent Torque Vectoring performance evaluation comparison for electric vehicles

Abstract

Nowadays, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have become one of the main research areas, being electric vehicles (EVs) and automated vehicles key topics. To guarantee safety and comfort and maximize their efficiency, proper vehicle dynamics control systems such as Torque Vectoring (TV) are mandatory. This work proposes an intelligent TV approach for EVs which considers the vertical force distribution among the tractive wheels. This approach allows to maximize vehicle cornering capacity and also its efficiency. In order to demonstrate its effectiveness, its performance is compared using Dynacar High Fidelity vehicle simulator with three traditional approaches found in the literature: PID, Second Order Sliding Mode Control (SOSMC) and Fuzzy Control. Results show that all evaluated controllers improve the handling of the vehicle and the efficiency with respect to the baseline vehicle. However, the proposed intelligent TV system provides better overall results.