An Open-Source Scaled Automobile Platform for Fault-Tolerant Electronic Stability Control

Today's technology allows the construction of complex experimental apparatus with reasonable budget. This paper supplies detailed guidelines for constructing a low-cost scaled automobile platform for research and education in vehicle dynamics and control. It summarizes the knowledge gathered when designing, building, and evaluating a model car, which was deployed in a real-world environment for testing an electronic stability control (ESC) algorithm. The model car was built using off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software. Data from a variety of onboard sensors are fused in real time so as to deliver accurate measurements to the ESC algorithm, whereas sensor fault diagnosis is achieved at the same time through an innovative approach based on artificial neural networks (NNs). The detailed presentation of this case study provides a roadmap on how a researcher can build effective experimental automotive platforms for research and educational purposes.