Improving The Manoeuvrability of Electric Vehicle with Four-Wheel Drive and Four-Wheel Steering – A Nonlinear Model Vehicle Dynamics Approach

The dynamics motion of a vehicle is inherently a nonlinear dynamics system especially at high speed. Majority of past researches on four-wheel steering (4WS) vehicle adopt easier way of modelling a control system based on vehicle with linear dynamic equation of motion. This paper study on the vehicle dynamics of an electric vehicle with 4WD and 4WS based on nonlinear vehicle dynamic approach. A numerical simulation was performed to analyse the variance of a linear model and nonlinear model during cornering at various constant speed. The results show that during low speed cornering at 10 km/h , the linear and nonlinear model produced similar steady state cornering based on the trajectory and yaw rotational speed. However, the variants of linear and nonlinear started to appear as the vehicle speed increase. By obtaining the steady state cornering speed, another numerical simulation was performed to analyse the characteristics of the 4WD and 4WS electric vehicle. A passive control of the rear wheels’ steer angle was implement in the simulation. The results show that the parallel steering mode decreased the yaw rotational speed which broaden the trajectory of the cornering, while the opposite steering mode increased the yaw rotational speed that led to a tighter trajectory during cornering.