Control of the driver-vehicle-road interaction and drive-by-wire actuation systems in electric, hydrogen, fuel cells and “in wheel” powered vehicles

Eco-compatibility aims at drastic changes of people transportation means and, to grant proper mobility levels, the electrically-powered city-car concept provides effective solutions. This quite obviously leads to distributed actuation, with separately driven wheels and inconsistencies appear unless redundancy and tyre/road interaction are properly mastered. The Authors present in the paper some sample results of researches developed in past years at the University of Genova, Polytechnic University of Marche in Ancona, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, RG Engineering, Lamborghini Townlife, Carrozzeria Suzzarese. The paper is therefore centred on the close-loop characteristics of such kind of vehicles moving from the behaviour of the individual wheels (with compliant tyre and varying soil interactions); then the dynamics of different (sample) four wheels platforms are investigated, driven by redundant actuation on varying friction soils. Results are obtained, with resort to computer simulation; the kinematics constraints are introduced and the varying tyre-soil coupling conditions are related with the driving torque options.