Reconfigurable fault-tolerant controller synthesis for a steer-by-wire vehicle using independently driven wheels

Abstract

In this paper, a synthesis method for a reconfigurable fault-tolerant control system for use in a steer-by-wire vehicle is proposed. The vehicle considered in this paper is also assumed to have independently driven wheels. The control objective in this work is to enable the vehicle yaw rate to track the reference signal even when the steering actuator breaks down. Since the vehicle yaw rate can be controlled with either the front wheel turn angle or the yaw moment generated by the independently driven wheels, this system has actuator redundancy. We attempt to design a control system that manages this actuator redundancy so that the performance degradation due to the actuator failure is minimised. We utilise a control allocator based on on-line optimisation for managing the actuator redundancy. The fault-tolerant control system with a control allocator has several excellent properties. For example, the method can handle various failure situations. Also, since the control allocation problem is reduced to a convex quadratic programming problem, the on-line computational effort is relatively little. However, so far, it has been unclear whether the stability of the control system with the control allocator is guaranteed when the actuator failure occurs. Therefore, we propose a design method of a fault-tolerant controller based on on-line optimisation that guarantees the stability of the overall system. The effectiveness of the method is established through numerical examples.