A fault tolerant vehicle stability control using adaptive control allocation

This paper presents an integrated fault-tolerant adaptive control allocation strategy for four wheel frive - four wheel steering ground vehicles to increase yaw stability. Conventionally, control of brakes, motors and steering angles are handled separately. In this study, these actuators are controlled simultaneously using an adaptive control allocation strategy. The overall structure consists of two steps: At the first level, virtual control input consisting of the desired traction force, the desired moment correction and the required lateral force correction to maintain driver’s intention are calculated based on the driver’s steering and throttle input and vehicle’s side slip angle. Then, the allocation module determines the traction forces at each wheel, front steering angle correction and rear steering wheel angle, based on the virtual control input. Proposed strategy is validated using a non-linear three degree of freedom reduced two-track vehicle model and results demonstrate that the vehicle can successfully follow the reference motion while protecting yaw stability, even in the cases of device failure and changed road conditions.