CAREER: Integrated Estimation and Control of Over-Actuated Lightweight Electric Vehicles for Sustainable and Safe Mobility

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The research objectives of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program project are: 1) to create new theoretical methods and tools that allow systematic utilization of actuation-redundancy to achieve output-independent parameter estimation and its seamless synthesis with adaptive control for improving transient control performance of over-actuated systems under extreme conditions; and 2) to develop new active vehicle control methodologies that can explicitly address the lightweight vehicle (LWV) payload variation challenges and substantially improve LWV safety by judiciously employing the actuation-redundancy furnished by in-wheel motors on electric vehicles. Such research objectives will be pursued via fundamental theoretical and experimental studies. System evaluations and validations will be conducted by simulations and experiments. If successful, the research results will advance the active vehicle control by enabling accurate estimations of LWV parameters without affecting vehicle motions and systematically incorporating the estimated LWV parameters into the coordinated control of redundant actuators to improve the LWV motion control performance under extreme conditions. These methods will dramatically improve the safety of LWVs and thus enabling their widespread utilization, which will significantly and positively impact the energy and environmental (including greenhouse gases) concerns in the nation's transportation sector. Furthermore, the output-independent parameter estimation and integrated parameter estimation and control methods can advance the current control of other over-actuated systems such as aerospace, robotic, and biomedical systems. The research results from this project will be used to enrich two undergraduate/graduate courses and disseminated to industry. Undergraduate student research and high-school internship opportunities will be generated through collaboration with Ohio State University Women in Engineering Program and K-12 summer camp to engage students, particularly those from underrepresented groups.