Integrated design of control allocation and triple-step control for over-actuated electric ground vehicles with actuator faults

Abstract

Over-actuated electric ground vehicles (EGVs) with four individually activated in-wheel motors can satisfy the requirements for the total wheel torque and yaw moment through control allocation (CA), which improves not only the driving flexibility, active safety and energy efficiency but also the probability of in-wheel motor faults due to the significantly increased system complexity and number of actuators. This paper studies the development of an active fault-tolerant control (AFTC) strategy that integrates CA and triple-step control (TSC) to produce a nominal feedback controller and simultaneously handle actuator faults. The closed-loop system under control is stabilized with input-to-state stability (ISS). A theoretical architecture of the proposed AFTC strategy for over-actuated EGVs is presented with a robust CA design and novel TSC with adaptive control compensation (ACC). In addition, a numerical iterative algorithm is proposed for the implementation of the ACC, and the convergence condition is given. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is validated for a high-fidelity full-vehicle model constructed by the commercial software veDYNA.