An Improved Motion Control with Cyber-Physical Uncertainty Tolerance for Distributed Drive Electric Vehicle

A lateral motion control scheme for a distributed drive electric vehicle is presented in this paper, which takes into account both in-car network and movement-parameter uncertainty in a synthetic manner. Distributed drive vehicles have obvious advantages in terms of safety and comfort at high speeds due to the well-known E/E architecture, which includes an in-vehicle network, advanced vehicle motion control, and Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) technologies. This is a fundamentally cyber-physical system. However, on the other hand, the application/insertion of in-vehicle network and the dynamic of wide-range varying speeds introduce additional system uncertainties, such as time-varying network induced delays and inevitable system perturbation, making controller design a difficult problem and even making the system unstable. This paper develops a cyber-physical control scheme and under which a two-process perturbation analysis is proposed to illustrate the system uncertainties. A hierarchical control strategy is also devised, with an upper-level gain-scheduling controller dealing with speed perturbation uncertainties and a lower-level H∞ -LQR controller dealing with in-vehicle network uncertainty. Using real-time hardware in loop testing, the suggested control technique was found to be effective in dealing with both in-vehicle network and system perturbation problems while also ensuring reliable vehicle stability in all three scenarios.