All-wheel-driven torque vectoring control for vehicle’s active lateral safety

Abstract

Torque vectoring control is the one of the recent chassis control system for vehicle active safety, and has been widely used in high-performance vehicles to obtain better traction and cornering ability. Various kinds of torque vectoring configurations exist depending on what driven wheels are; among these controls, 4-wheel-driven torque vectoring, which can transfer every torque to a single wheel, has the greatest effect on stabilizing the ve-hicle. Two major actuators, front-to-rear and left-to-right distribution, are operated to distribute biased torque to each wheel for 4-wheel-driven vehicles. A new torque distribution method that optimizes these both actuators to maximize the usage of tire force is proposed in this paper. Proposed method determines what actuator is pri-marily used depending on vehicle states, thus fully utilizes tire force to generate yaw moment and to minimize lateral force loss. Lateral force loss of tires causes torque vectoring effect to diminish and also decreases corner-ing ability, which induces an unnecessary side slip angle. Performance of proposed method is evaluated through simulation using vehicle dynamics software Carsim and Simulink, and simulation conditions are mainly focused on lateral dynamics. Proposed method is compared with conventional control scheme to validate supremacy of proposed one.