Reconfigurable Fault-Tolerant Control of In-Wheel Electric Vehicles with Steering System Failure

The paper deals with the robust and fault tolerant control of an in-wheel electric vehicle, operated by four independently actuated in-wheel motors and steer-by-wire steering system. The goal of the design is to realize velocity and road trajectory tracking of the in-wheel vehicle, even during a fault event in the steer-by-wire steering system. When such a fault is detected, the control system is reconfigured and the torque allocation of the in wheel engines is recalculated to substitute for the yaw moment originally generated by the steering system. Thus, the vehicle is able to follow the designed path and velocity solely with torque vectoring generated by the independently-controlled in-Wheel motors. The high-level motion control of the vehicle is realized founded on the LPV framework, while the reconfiguration is based on constrained optimization techniques. The operation of the designed control system is demonstrated in a CarSim simulation environment. (C) 2015, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.