Adaptive Synthesized Fault-Tolerant Autonomous Ground Vehicle Control With Guaranteed Performance and Saturated Input

This paper investigates the synthesized motion control (simultaneous control of the path tracking and roll dynamics) of autonomous ground vehicles considering the tracking performance enhancement, actuator failures and input saturations. A novel adaptive fault-tolerant control (FTC) strategy is proposed in this study to achieve the control objective, which incorporates two contributions: Firstly, a finite-time prescribed performance function (PPF) is proposed for the prescribed performance control (PPC) based on a simplified error transformation formulation, which is used to embody the desired performance specifications and make PPC control design less complex but able to guarantee the tracking error constrained in a prescribed region within a finite time; Secondly, a stabilizing PPC controller is synthesized based on a modified Nussbaum-type function and barrier Lyapunov function (BLF), which also encompasses a simplified adaptive neural network (ANN) term for approximating the unknown system nonlinearities. The synthesized FTC controller is capable of realizing the finite-time prescribed transient control while handling the actuator failures and input saturations simultaneously. The results of a high-fidelity Simulink-CarSim simulation on a slippery road have validated the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed synthesized FTC strategy compared with a traditional sliding mode control (SMC), and a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation has been implemented to verify the real-time performance of the proposed control strategy.