This paper presents an energy efficient control strategy for electric vehicle (EV) driven by in-wheel-motors (IWMs) based on discrete adaptive sliding mode control (DASMC). The nonlinear vehicle model, tire model and the IWM model are established at first to represent the operation mechanism of the whole system. Based on the modeling, two virtual control variables are used to represent the longitudinal and yaw control efforts to coordinate the vehicle motion control. Then DASMC method is

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... to calculate the required total driving torque and yaw moment, which can improve the tracking performance as well as the system robustness. According to the vehicle nonlinear model, the additional yaw moment can be expressed as a function of longitudinal and lateral tire forces. For further control scheme development, a tire force estimator using unscented Kalman filter is designed to estimate real-time tire forces. On these bases, energy efficient torque allocation method is developed to distribute the total driving torque and differential torque to each IWM, considering the motor energy consumption, the tire slip energy consumption and the brake energy recovery. Simulation results of the proposed control strategy using co-platform of Matlab/Simulink and CarSim® demonstrate that it can accomplish the vehicle motion control in a coordinated and economic way.