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A two-passenger all-wheel-drive urban electric vehicle (AUTO21EV) with four in-wheel motors and an active steering system has been designed and developed at the University of Waterloo. In order to evaluate the handling and performance of such a vehicle in the design stage and analyze the effectiveness of different chassis control systems before implementing them in the real vehicle, the simulation of a large number of different open-loop and closed-loop test maneuvers is necessary. Thus, in the simulation environment, not only is a mathematical vehicle model needed for every test maneuver, but a driver model must also be designed to simulate the closed-loop test maneuvers. The role of the driver model is to calculate the control inputs required to successfully follow a predefined path.

A two-passenger all-wheel drive urban electric vehicle (AUTO21EV) with four direct-drive in-wheel motors and an active steering system has been designed and developed at the University of Waterloo. A novel fuzzy slip control system is developed for this vehicle using the advantage of four in-wheel motors. A conventional slip control system uses the hydraulic brake system in order to control the tire slip ratio, which is the difference between the wheel center velocity and the velocity of the tire contact patch along the wheel plane, thereby influencing the longitudinal dynamics of a vehicle. The advantage of the proposed fuzzy slip controller is that it acts as an ABS system by preventing the tires from locking up when braking, as a TCS by preventing the tires from spinning out when accelerating.