Fault-Tolerant Control for Electric Vehicles With Independently Driven in-Wheel Motors Considering Individual Driver Steering Characteristics

This paper presents a fault-tolerant control (FTC) method for electric vehicles with independently driven in-wheel-motors (IWM) considering individual human driver steering characteristics. Both the human driver steering model and the vehicle lateral dynamic model are formed for the FTC strategy design while taking into account modeling inaccuracies. Based on the driver-vehicle system model, a dual-loop, sliding-mode controller is designed to deal with the IWM fault and accomplish vehicle motion control in a customized way with explicit respect to individual driver steering characteristics. The proposed control strategy contains two layers: the first layer calculates a reference heading angle aiming to reduce the tracking error induced by the IWM actuator fault; the second layer computes the additional yaw moment needed to track the reference heading angle and suppress the influence of the modeling errors. Such an individualized FTC control method can specifically assist the human driver in post-fault vehicle motion control while reducing the physical and mental workloads of the human driver. Simulation results of the proposed FTC method using MATLAB/Simulink-CarSim demonstrate that it can accomplish the expected post-fault vehicle motion control while providing appropriate control assistance to different drivers in an individualized and cooperative way.