Adaptive fault-tolerant control for distributed in-wheel motor drive electric vehicles with unknown brake systems' faults

We present in this study an adaptive fault-tolerant control (adaptive FTC) strategy to ensure the handling and safety of the distributed in-wheel motor drive electric vehicles (DIMDEVs) against unknown brake systems' faults. The proposed adaptive FTC derives the constraints about additional lateral tire force and yaw moments to stabilize DIMDEV when the brake systems' faults occur, which tracks the desired trajectories including the ideal yaw rate and lateral velocity. Then the proper drive torque increments are calculated by the optimization with the derived constraints and applied on DIMDEV to realize the fault-tolerant capacity. The convergence of the whole scheme is proved by the Lyapunov stability theory and Barbalat's lemma. Finally, the joint simulation of commercial software Carsim and Simulink verifies the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm, which lays the foundation for the safety of electric vehicle chassis.