Autonomous drift controller for distributed drive electric vehicle with input coupling and uncertain disturbance

Exploring the drift maneuver could extend the dynamic control envelope and application range of autonomous vehicles. This paper presents a novel autonomous drift controller for a distributed drive electric vehicle, whose configuration provides more possibilities for drift. In the upper-level controller, a control channel recombination method transforms the over-actuated system into a standard square system, which is compatible with the proposed fuzzy-integral sliding-mode controller considering the input coupling and uncertain disturbance of the system to bring the vehicle into a marginally stable condition. The operation of the lower-level controller considers the dynamic characteristics of actuators and tires, and distributes the "virtual control input" among each physical actuator. This controller's performance with fast response and strong robustness was proved through the bench test.