Electronic Differential Control of Independent Wheel Drive NEV using Drive Current Balancing Strategy

Abstract

This paper presents the design and real-time implementation of an electronic differential speed control system (EDSC) for a neighborhood electric vehicle (NEV) with a decentralized power train configuration. The EDSC supervises the desired speed variation of the drive motors of the vehicle at various turning trajectories. The core focus of this design is to reduce the system complexity, computation delay and design expenses with an aid of a newly proposed drive current balancing algorithm (DCBA). The embedded DCBA based EDSC allocates the necessary torque to each wheel solely depending on the motor current variables. Thus, it eliminates the necessities of typical feedback variables-steering and speed to control the EDSC. The developed system performance is being investigated in situ real time on-board experiment. Results in the context of response time, design simplicity and performance reveal the effectiveness of the proposed framework.