Integrated Dynamics Control for Path Tracking and Obstacle Avoidance of Four-Wheel Intelligent Distributed Drive Vehicles Based on Time-Varying Predictive Control

The four-wheel intelligent distributed drive vehicle (4WIDEVs) has been attracted a great attention in dynamics control due to its inherent actuation flexibility recently. However, frequent variation of vehicle speed in dynamic control is usually ignored or simplified. To enhance the driving safety in the extreme path tracking and obstacle avoidance maneuvers, this paper proposed an integrated dynamic control method. We first design the time-varying predictive model comprehensively considering velocity variation and yaw stability. Compared with the traditional speed constant model, by analyzing the mechanism of multi-degree of freedom nonlinear adaptive time-varying characteristics of four-wheel independent vehicles model, the influence of frequently changing speed on model accuracy is reduced. For ensuring the tracking accuracy, a linear adaptive time-varying predictive based control method (LATV-MPC) is developed to compute optimal front wheel steering angle and longitudinal tire force, where the predictive model is updated in each time horizon with the changing speed, eliminating the errors accumulation between the prediction model and real state. Simulation results based on MATLAB and CarsSim platform demonstrates that the proposed integrated dynamics control strategy allows the yaw stability to perform better and the tracking error to decrease in both double lane change and random obstacle avoidance scenario.