Adaptive Fault Detection and Emergency Control of Autonomous Vehicles for Fail-Safe Systems Using a Sliding Mode Approach

This paper presents a sliding mode-based adaptive fault detection and emergency control algorithm for implementation in fail-safe systems of autonomous vehicles. The overall algorithm is comprised of a fault detection part and a fail-safe control part. For the former, sliding mode observer-based fault detection algorithms were developed for environment and chassis sensors, including LiDAR, Radar, and acceleration sensors. Unidentified fault signals from the sensors are reconstructed through the adaptive sliding mode observer. The reconstruction is based on the MIT rule through the use of an estimated sensitivity parameter. For the latter, a sliding mode control (SMC)-based emergency control method designed to respond to fault occurrences has been proposed to ensure the functional safety of autonomous vehicles. An adaptive gain parameter was designed, taking convergence time into consideration, to secure consistent and rapid responses from the controller. When the detection algorithm detects a fault, the appropriate control input is computed by a lower controller for the vehicle. This control input is calculated based on the last scene information obtained from an upper controller. The performance of the proposed fault detection and control algorithms has been evaluated through simulations and actual vehicle tests of various scenarios.