Fault-Tolerant Control for Electric Ground Vehicles With Independently-Actuated In-Wheel Motors

This paper presents an in-wheel motor fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control method for four-wheel independently actuated (4WIA) electric vehicles. The 4WIA electric vehicle is one of the promising architectures for electric vehicles. While such a vehicle architecture greatly increases the flexibility for vehicle control, it also elevates the requirements on system reliability, safety, and fault tolerance due to the increased number of actuators. A fault diagnosis approach for finding the faulty in-wheel motor/motor driver pair is developed. The proposed diagnosis approach does not need an accurate knowledge on tire-road friction coefficient (TRFC) and is robust to tire force modeling inaccuracies. Based on the in-wheel motor/motor driver fault diagnosis mechanism, a control-allocation based vehicle fault-tolerant control system is designed to accommodate the in-wheel motor/motor driver fault by automatically allocating the control effort among other healthy wheels. Simulations using a high-fidelity, CarSimVR, full-vehicle model show the effectiveness of the proposed in-wheel motor/motor driver fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control approaches. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4005050]