Research on Yaw Stability Control for Distributed-Drive Pure Electric Pickup Trucks

To address the issue of poor yaw stability in distributed-drive electric pickup trucks at medium-to-high speeds, particularly under the influence of continuously varying tire forces and road adhesion coefficients, a novel Kalman filter-based method for estimating the road adhesion coefficient, combined with a Tube-based Model Predictive Control (Tube-MPC) algorithm, is proposed. This integrated approach enables real-time estimation of the dynamically changing road adhesion coefficient while simultaneously ensuring vehicle yaw stability is maintained under rapid response requirements. The developed hierarchical yaw stability control architecture for distributed-drive electric pickup trucks employs a square root cubature Kalman filter (SRCKF) in its upper layer for accurate road adhesion coefficient estimation; this estimated coefficient is subsequently fed into the intermediate layer’s corrective yaw moment solver where Tube-based Model Predictive Control (Tube-MPC) tracks desired sideslip angle and yaw rate trajectories to derive the stability-critical corrective yaw moment, while the lower layer utilizes a quadratic programming (QP) algorithm for precise four-wheel torque distribution. The proposed control strategy was verified through co-simulation using Simulink and Carsim, with results demonstrating that, compared to conventional MPC and PID algorithms, it significantly improves both the driving stability and control responsiveness of distributed-drive electric pickup trucks under medium- to high-speed conditions.