Deadzone-Quadratic Penalty Function for Predictive Extended Cruise Control with Experimental Validation

Battery Electric Vehicles have high potentials for the modern transportations, however, they are facing limited cruising range. To address this limitation, we present a semi-autonomous ecological driver assistance system to regulate the velocity with energy-efficient techniques. The main contribution of this paper is the design of a real-time nonlinear receding horizon optimal controller to plan the online cost-effective cruising velocity. Instead of conventional L2-norms, a deadzone-quadratic penalty function for the nonlinear model predictive controller is proposed. Obtained field experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for a semi-autonomous electric vehicle in terms of real-time energy-efficient velocity regulation and constraints satisfaction.