Research on Decoupling Control of Four-Wheel Steering Distributed Drive Electric Vehicles

To address the issue of limited accuracy in vehicle lateral and longitudinal dynamics control—caused by the strong coupling and nonlinearity between the four-wheel steering and distributed drive systems, particularly under crosswind disturbances—a control method integrating differential geometric decoupling with robust control is proposed. This integrated approach mitigates coupling effects among the vehicle motions in various directions, thereby enhancing overall robustness. The control architecture adopts a hierarchical structure: the upper layer takes the deviation between the ideal and actual models as input and generates longitudinal, yaw, and lateral control laws via robust control; the middle layer employs differential geometric methods to decouple the nonlinear system, deriving the total driver-required driving torque, additional yaw moment, and rear-wheel steering angle; and the lower layer utilizes a quadratic programming algorithm to optimize the distribution of driving torque across the four wheels. Finally, simulation verification is conducted based on a co-simulation platform using TruckSim 2022 and MATLAB R2024a/Simulink. The simulation results demonstrate that, compared to the sliding mode control (SMC) and the uncontrolled scenario, the proposed method improves the driving stability and safety of the four-wheel steering distributed drive vehicle under multiple operating conditions.