Conceptual Design and Simulation of the Traction Control System of a High Performance Electric Vehicle

This paper presents the conceptual design of the traction control system of a high performance electric vehicle with four driven wheels, intended to be used in quarter mile competitions. Different models of the longitudinal and vertical vehicle’s dynamics are presented, in order to consider the coupling dynamics of front and rear wheels. Two slip control strategies are proposed so as to maximize the traction forces of the wheels. The first one consists of a traditional control scheme applied to each wheel of the vehicle. Since the interaction between the tire and the road is often poorly known, the second controller proposed consists of a perturbation based extremum seeking control (PBESC), in order to maximize the traction force without knowledge of the road and the tire characteristics. Finally an auto tuning process based on low discrepancy sequences for both control systems is presented.