An Analytical Approach to Improve Vehicle Maneuverability via Torque Vectoring Control: Theoretical Study and Experimental Validation

To improve the maneuverability of a vehicle and fully leverage the advantages of torque vectoring control (TVC) in improving vehicle dynamics, a method to analytically improve the cornering response based on TVC is proposed in this paper. A feedforward and feedback control architecture based on a two-degree-of-freedom vehicle model is first introduced. An analytical expression of the yaw moment feedforward model is derived under the condition that the transfer function of the ideal yaw rate with respect to the real one is equal to 1. Then, the key influencing factors of the additional yaw moment are investigated in detail. More importantly, the real experimental results under steady and transit state are analyzed to demonstrate how the proposed controller can improve vehicle maneuverability. Experimental results show that the bandwidth of vehicle transient response could be improved by 29.6% in the tests. The controller can be easily extended to any type of TVC even though it is applied to a rear-wheel driven electric vehicle in this paper.