Robust cascaded automatic cruise control of electric vehicles

This article focuses on automatic cruise control for electrically driven vehicles. The objective is to track a given vehicle‐velocity profile. For this type of application, the so‐called wheel slip plays a key role, as it is a measure for the force transmitted from the wheel to the road. Conventional wheel‐ slip controllers are usually activated if the absolute value of the slip exceeds pre‐assumed thresholds. Furthermore, it is distinguished between a braking and acceleration maneuver using separately designed and implemented controllers. In contrast, the proposed concept requires neither an activation strategy for the slip controller nor a distinction between braking and acceleration. The cascaded control structure is based upon adaptive‐gains super twisting sliding‐mode algorithm, and the friction force estimator is realized as a second‐order sliding‐mode observer with constant gains. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed concept are demonstrated in numerical simulations using a complex multibody vehicle model. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.