Ride Blending Control for AWD Electric Vehicle with In-Wheel Motors and Electromagnetic Suspension

This paper presents a controller for enhancing the ride comfort of electric vehicles with in-wheel motors (IWM) and electromagnetic suspensions (AS). The combined use of IWMs and AS to increase the ride comfort is referred to as Ride Blending (RB). The purpose of this integrated control, its general idea and concept are discussed. The Ride Blending controller is based on a multi-layer  hierarchical control architecture. To continuously allocate the demand between the actuators, the control makes use of a cost function optimisation where the ideal control parameters for the current time step are defined. The goal of each component of this function is explained and the structure of each one is described. The use of the ride blending control is then demonstrated on various driving manoeuvres to show the functionality and the ride quality improvement.