  There is growing interest in fully electric vehicles in the automotive
industry as it becomes increasingly more difficult to meet new and upcoming
emission regulations based on internal combustion engines. Fully electric
vehicles do not have an internal combustion engine. Hence, drive torque change
for a traction control system and for a yaw stability control system has to be
through the electric motor used for traction. The regenerative braking
capability of fully electric vehicles has to be taken into account in designing
braking controllers like ABS and yaw stability control through differential
braking. Fully electric vehicles are usually lighter vehicles with different
dynamic characteristics than that of their predecessors using internal
combustion engines. As such, their yaw stability control systems have to be
re-designed and tested. This paper reports the initial results of ongoing work
on yaw stability controller design for a fully electric vehicle. Two different
implementations on a research prototype fully electric light commercial vehicle
are considered. The first implementation uses the production yaw stability
control system in the internal combustion engine powered conventional vehicle.
The drive torque change commands from the production ECU are read, modified and
sent to the electric motor driver in trying to mimic the conventional vehicle.
The differential braking commands are the same as in the conventional vehicle.
In the second implementation, a generic yaw stability control system that
calculates and issues its own drive torque change commands and differential
braking commands is designed and implemented. Offline simulations on a
validated model and a hardware-in-the-loop simulation system are used in
designing the yaw stability control system.
