Novel reaching law based predictive sliding mode control for lateral motion control of in-wheel motor drive electric vehicle with delay estimation

The lateral motion control of an in-wheel motor drive electric vehicle (IWMD-EV) necessitates an accurate measurement of the vehicle states. However, these measured states are always affected by delays due to sensor measurements, communication latencies, and computation time, which results in the degradation of the controller performance. Motivated by this issue, a novel reaching law based predictive sliding mode control (NRL-PSMC) is proposed to maintain the lateral motion control of the IWMD-EV subjected to unknown time delay. Initially, a PSMC framework is built, in which a predictor integrating with the sliding mode control is designed to eliminate the effect of time delay and generate the virtual control signals. Further, to alleviate the chattering phenomenon, a novel-reaching law is developed, enabling the vehicle to track the desired states effectively. Subsequently, a dynamic control allocation technique is presented to optimally allocate the virtual control input to the actual control input. The accurate estimation of the aforementioned unknown delay is realized through a delay estimator. Finally, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop experiments are performed for three specific driving manoeuvres, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller design.