Distributed drive electric autonomous vehicle steering angle control based on active disturbance rejection control

Based on active disturbance rejection control technique and characteristics of electric power steering, a steering angle tracking controller is designed, which consists of an aligning moment estimator to deal with modeling error and nonlinearity of electric power steering. The aligning moment estimator is based on an extended state observer and takes steering system friction and differential drive steering torque, which is a unique phenomenon in a distributed drive electric vehicle, into consideration. According to the estimated aligning moment and tracking differentiator, the steering angle tracking controller is designed based on a nonlinear state feedback control and feedforward compensation control laws. Results of various simulations and experiments, including pivot steering, step input steering, and sinusoidal input steering, show that the proposed controller has good performance in tracking reference steering angle and is convenient to implement. With the aligning moment estimator, the proposed controller shows better results in comparative experiments than a conditional integral-based steering angle tracking controller.