Fixed-Time and Fault-Tolerant Path-Following Control for Autonomous Vehicles With Unknown Parameters Subject to Prescribed Performance

With the consideration of actuator faults, including the unknown steering mechanism misalignments and motor traction losses, this article presents a fixed-time control protocol to follow reference paths and velocities for autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) with preset performance constraints. To provide sufficient large boundaries for the initial states, the hyperbolic tangent function is employed to predefine the constraints with respect to the path-following and velocity control performance. Based on the homeomorphic mapping and barrier Lyapunov theorem, the fixed-time prescribed performance control (PPC) objective-integrated fault-tolerant scheme can be achieved for the controlled AGV. In comparison to three different fixed-time controllers without the fault-tolerant or PPC scheme, the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test results demonstrate that the proposed control protocol can always provide superior control performance for the AGV under various maneuvering conditions.