In this paper, after investigating the coupling effect in a permanent magnet synchronous in-wheel motor, a robust control method for active suspension of hub-driven electric vehicles (EVs) to enhance the performance of the in-wheel motor and the vehicle is proposed. Based on the electric vehicle model addressing the coupling effect between the electromagnetic excitation of the permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) and the transient dynamics in EVs, the influence of the coupling effect on the motor and the vehicle performance is analyzed. The results reflect that the coupling effect in in-wheel motors intensifies the magnetic force oscillation, aggravates the eccentricity of the rotor, deteriorates the motor operation performance, and worsens the ride comfort. To suppress the magnetic force oscillation in motor and enhance the vehicle comfort, the active suspension system considering five aspects of suspension performance is introduced. Simultaneously, on the basis of Lyapunov stability theory, a reliable robust H_ꝏ controller considering model uncertainties, actuator failure and electromagnetic force interference is designed. The simulation results reflect that the robust H_ꝏ feedback controller can not only achieve better ride comfort, but also restrain the coupling effect in the motor. Meanwhile the other requirements such as the road holding capability, the actuator limitation, and the suspension deflection are also maintained. The proposed robust control method demonstrates a potential application in the practice of EV control.

With the electrification and intellectualization of vehicle systems, electromagnetic active suspension has been paid more and more attention. Linear motor is one of the effective actuators of the electromagnetic active suspension system. The nonlinear factors of linear motor, such as nonlinear friction force and ripple force, as well as power limit and magnetic saturation, will reduce the performance of electromagnetic active suspension. However, the current research rarely considers the effect of these nonlinear factors on active suspension control. In this article, the effect of nonlinearities of linear motors on electromagnetic active suspension performance and the ways to improve their performance are studied. An adaptive filtering compensation method is proposed to reduce the influence of nonlinear factors on the electromagnetic active suspension control. According to the simulated calculations, performance degradation of the active suspension is observed in both the primary control objective and high-frequency range due to inherent disturbance from the nonlinear factors. Also, the electromagnetic nonlinearities will reduce the active suspension effective force output. By proposing an adaptive compensator based on the filtered-x recursive least squares algorithm, the first-order resonance of the suspension system could be controlled and the electromagnetic active suspension effective force could be magnified. Also, convergence of the adaptive compensator is found to be rapid and reasonable.

A simultaneous trajectory tracking and stability control method is present for the four-wheel independent drive (4WID) automated vehicles to handle dynamic coupling maneuvers. To conquer the disadvantage that attendant disturbances caused by the dynamic coupling of traditional decentralized control methods degenerate the trajectory tracking accuracy, the proposed method takes advantage of the idea of decoupling to optimize the tracking performance. After establishing the dynamic model of the 4WID automated vehicles, the coupling mechanism of the vehicle dynamic control and its negative effect on trajectory tracking were studied at first. The inverse system model was then determined by machine learning and connected in series with the controlled object to form a pseudo linear system to realize dynamic decoupling. Finally, differing from previous tracking methods following the apparent lateral position and longitudinal velocity references, the pseudo linear system tracks the ideal intermediate targets transferred from the target trajectory, that is, the accelerations of vehicle in longitudinal, lateral and yaw directions, to indirectly achieve trajectory tracking and validly restrain the vehicle motion. The effectiveness of the proposed method, i.e., the high tracking accuracy and the stable driving performance, is verified through three coupling driving scenarios in the CarSim-Simulink co-simulations platform.

Since one control loop input disturbs the control of another loop, the dynamic coupling of the longitudinal and lateral directions adversely affects the motion tracking accuracy of autonomous vehicles. With the ability to minimize the interactions between the longitudinal and lateral dynamics, the inverse system learned by the neural network is an effective way to decouple vehicle dynamics. After tracking the vehicle states projected from the desire motion, the dynamic decoupling and the motion tracking are both realized. However, the accumulation of vehicle state tracking errors causes the stable yaw tracking error and the lateral tracking divergence. To solve the accompanying problem, a path correction model is designed to periodically update the desired vehicle states. Moreover, the applicability of the inverse system decoupling method is improved in this paper, because the method usually adopted in distributed drive electric vehicles is applied to four-wheel driving vehicles representing the traditional driving form. Simulation results indicate that the decoupling motion tracking method with the path correction model is suitable for long-distance and complex conditions and has the highest comprehensive tracking accuracy compared with the integrated MPC (model predictive control) and the pure pursuit in the dynamic coupling conditions.