Experimental Platform for Innovative Electric Car Architectures

Currently great efforts are taken to move from ordinary cars with combustion engine towards fully electric cars with eCorners. In industry this way leads over cars with hybrid engines. Thereby a lot of the restrictions of combustion engines are inherited and the electric engine is only used to replace the ordinary engine. So this approach can not benefit from the new features of electric engines. On the other side all the mechanical safety mechanisms are working as before to ensure necessary functionality in situations of system blackouts.

Within the eCar project, an experimental platform is built to demonstrate the new possibilities with respect to the state of the art in computer science. The goal is to develop an innovative architecture for electric cars fully steered by x-by-wire. Further project goals are centralization of control functions to minimize the number of ECUs, an innovative system for redundancy management, and an unification of used bus protocols.

CAD model of fortiss eCar

Key Data:

4 independable eCorner modules
- 2 kW drive power
- 520 rpm max.
- 160 Nm max. torque
- independent steerable
- ca. 50 kg weight

Controllers
- 1 computer for driver input and display of information (Linux-PC)
- 1 central controller (Luminary Micro LM3S8962 Board)
- 2 controllers one placed on each axis (Luminary Micro LM3S8962 Board)
Communication
- Between central controller and axis controllers a real-time Ethernet protocol based on IEEE 1588 is used, which supports time- and event-triggered communication
- Between axis controllers and eCorner-modules via CAN bus (CANopen)
Input / Output
- Side stick
- 10" touch screen
4 truck batteries
- 48 V drive motors
- 24 V steering motors
- 12 V HMI computer and touch screen
- 5 V Luminary boards and hub
ca. 2.2 x 1.3 x 1.7 m (LxWxH) dimension
ca. 600 kg total weight
ca. 50 km/h max speed
1 passenger