Actuator fault tolerant control for steer-by-wire systems

Automotive steer-by-wire (SbW) system is a safety-critical system where the safety and reliability issues must be addressed during the operation. This paper proposes a fault detection and isolation-based actuator fault tolerant control for SbW system based on model predictive control. The fault detection and isolation module uses a two-stage Kalman filtering algorithm to provide simultaneous control parameter and state estimation to detect the occurrence of actuator failure. Additionally, a model predictive controller is designed to maintain the original functionality of the SbW systems using the output of fault detection and isolation to update the fault information. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach by numerical simulations and experiments on our SbW platform. The simulation and experimental results illustrate that our approach achieves a better steering performance than a conventional model predictive controller without fault detection and isolation and stabilise the overall SbW system in occurrence of actuator failure.