Fault tolerant longitudinal and lateral control for automated highway systems

Increasing highway traffic congestion and real estate costs that limit the building of new highways has brought about a renewed interest in an automated highway system (AHS) where the vehicle steering task ("lateral controls") and the braking/throttle control tasks ("longitudinal control") are taken over by computers to increase the throughput of existing highways. Since safety plays a key role in the development of an AHS, fault tolerant control is vital. In this paper, we develop longitudinal and lateral fault tolerant sliding mode control algorithms and prove that these control algorithms are stable for a variety of faults (e.g. in the braking, powertrain, and steering systems). Finally, the performance of the sliding mode controllers is demonstrated through a series of simulations incorporating various vehicle and AHS faults.