RMPC-Based directional stability control for electric vehicles subject to tire blowout on curved expressway

This paper presents a directional stability control based on robust tube-based model predictive control (RMPC) approach for an overactuated electric vehicle after tire blowout on curved expressway, in the presence of the exogenous disturbances, such as cross wind and road variation. To begin with, the vehicle dynamic simulation platform allowing for the tire vertical force redistribution after tire blowout is presented, and the reliability of the platform is further analyzed by comparing with the existing experimental test results. After that, a RMPC-based controller is designed to enhance the directional stability performance of the vehicle on curved expressway after tire burst. Also, a pseudo inverse switch control allocator is developed to realize the allocation of the desired resultant signal for the remained effective wheels at the last stage. In the end, the simulation results conducting on the depicted simulation platform demonstrate the favorable maneuverability of the proposed method over the conventional model predictive control (MPC) in enhancing directional stability performance of the vehicle after a tire blowout on curved expressway.