Traction control system design for an all-wheel-drive electric vehicle

This work presents a traction control system (TCS) designed for the all-wheel drive electric vehicle of Race UP, the Formula SAE team of the University of Padua. The TCS aims at avoiding excessive slip at each wheel, by reducing the provided torque whenever the longitudinal slip exceeds a suitable upper threshold. This is achieved by: i) estimating vehicle velocity through a Kalman Filter, which processes data from the inertial measurement unit, steering angle, and motor speeds; ii) computing a torque correcting factor through a properly tuned proportional–integral–derivative controller. The TCS was designed in Simulink environment, where it was preliminarily validated and tuned. It was then implemented in the actual vehicle control unit, to be fine-tuned via experimental testing on race tracks.