Robust Electronic Differential Controller for an Electric Vehicle

This study presents an efficient and robust control scheme of electronic differential system for an electric vehicle. The proposed system consists of two Brushless DC motors (BLDC) that ensure the drive of the two back driving wheels of an electric vehicle. Electronic Differential Controller (EDC) ensures the maximum torque and it can control both the driving wheel independently to turn at different speeds in any curve and also distribute the power to each motor according to the steering angle. EDC is designed to facilitate experimentation with an electric vehicle using the PIC 16F877A. The BLDC motor has been controlled by the method of back EMF zero crossing detection. The effectiveness and substantiation of the proposed methods are ascertained in the MATLAB/Simulink environment and also experimentally validated. The experimental results give satisfactory performance with the proposed electronic control scheme which also ensures the stability of the vehicle in all road conditions.