Advanced post‐impact safety and stability control for electric vehicles

In terms of the possible secondary or multiple events accidents (MEA) after an initial vehicle to vehicle (V2V) impact, this research proposes an active safety & stability controller for independent-driven electric vehicles towards recovering the vehicle to safety states after an impact. The controller aims to regulate the course angle and lateral deviation that enforce the vehicle back to its original driving path. The upper-level controller is derived based on sliding mode technique. And the low-level controller aims to solve a convex quadratic allocation problem, which inherently incorporates fault-tolerance property. The independent in-wheel-motor (IWM) fault is very likely to happen under a real V2V impact and it contributes much to the driving safety & stability. Two typical real-end-collision scenarios under low- and high longitudinal velocities are designed to verify the proposed controller performance. The low- and high velocities collisions aim to simulate the urban and highway accidents, respectively. Compared to other control methods, i.e. pure braking and static allocation, the RMSEs of safety (lateral deviation, course angle) and stability indexes (yaw rate, sideslip angle) under proposed controller reduce significantly both in urban and highway accidents. Moreover, the controller performs robust enough against the impact-induced IWM fault. It further supports the effectiveness at dealing with the safety and stability of the ego vehicle after an initial impact and prevent possible MEA.