Torque coordinated control of the through-the-road (TTR) 4-wheel-drive (4WD) hybrid vehicle under extreme road conditions

Abstract Vehicular safety is of considerable significance to the intelligent development of hybrid vehicles. However, the real-time stability control or reasonable torque distribution under the extreme road conditions remain a huge challenge due to the multiple uncertain parameters and difficulties to reconcile the handling and stability performance. To address the above problems for a through-the-road (TTR) 4-wheel-drive (4WD) hybrid vehicle, this study provides a handling and stability management (HSM) approach by incorporating the offline optimization rules and on-line model predictive control (MPC). Firstly, the vehicle dynamic model with seven degrees of freedom (7-DOF) is used to offline extract torque distribution rules (Offline-ETDR), and the online MPC feedback (Online-MPCF) is utilized to compensate the extra torque requirements for the poor effect under the extreme conditions. Accordingly, the offline optimization results and online correction are fused to provide the total torque demand given the real-time road condition detection. Finally, the real vehicle test are implemented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed torque coordination strategy. In comparison to the vehicle with no torque control strategy, the proposed method significantly improves the vehicle's cornering ability while also ensuring the high stability performance.