Title: The design of a fault-tolerant vehicle control system

Authors: Peter Gaspar, Zoltan Szabo, Jozsef Bokor

Addresses: Systems and Control Laboratory, Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary. ' Systems and Control Laboratory, Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary. ' Systems and Control Laboratory, Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary

Abstract: To improve the performance properties of heavy vehicles, i.e., to reduce the risk of rollovers, to improve passenger comfort and road holding, a reconfigurable fault-tolerant control design of the active suspensions and the active brake is performed. However, when a fault (loss in effectiveness) occurs at one of the suspension actuators a reconfiguration is needed in order to maintain the same performance level. The detection of the fault is based on a Fault Detection and Identification (FDI) filter, which is based on an observer design. The proposed reconfiguration scheme is based on an H_∞ Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) method that uses the fault information as one of the scheduling variables. The LPV based control design and the operation of the control mechanism are demonstrated in a vehicle manoeuvre.

Keywords: fault-tolerant control; reconfiguration; fault detection; linear parameter varying control; nonlinear modelling; robust control; fault tolerance; heavy vehicles; vehicle control; active suspension; active brakes.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVAS.2009.027966

International Journal of Vehicle Autonomous Systems, 2009 Vol.7 No.1/2, pp.36 - 55

Received: 19 Dec 2007
Accepted: 06 Nov 2008
Published online: 24 Aug 2009 *

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