Fault-Tolerant Control of Electric Ground Vehicles With Independently-Actuated Wheels

This paper presents a fault-tolerant control method for four-wheel independently driven (4WID) electric vehicles. 4WID electric vehicle is one of the promising architectures for electric vehicles in the future. While such a vehicle architecture greatly increases the flexibility for vehicle control, it also demands more on system reliability, safety, and fault tolerance due to the increased number of actuators and subsystems. An active fault tolerant control approach for 4WID electric vehicle is developed to accommodate the fault of in-wheel motor and motor driver pairs. Based on an in-wheel motor/motor driver fault detection mechanism, a control-allocation based vehicle 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 CarSim^® full-vehicle model show the effectiveness of the proposed fault-tolerant control approach.