Yun Hu

To solve the problems with the existing active fault-tolerant control system, which does not consider the cooperative control of the drive system and steering system or accurately relies on the vehicle model when one or more motors fail, a multi-input and multi-output model-free adaptive active fault-tolerant control method for four-wheel independently driven electric vehicles is proposed. The method, which only uses the input/output data of the vehicle in the control system design, is based on a new dynamic linearization technique with a pseudo-partial derivative, aimed at solving the complex and nonlinear issues of the vehicle model. The desired control objectives can be achieved by the coordinated adaptive fault-tolerant control of the drive and steering systems under different failure conditions of the drive system. The error convergence and input-output boundedness of the control system are proven by means of stability analysis. Finally, simulations and further experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness and real-time response of the fault-tolerant system in different driving scenarios. The results demonstrate that our proposed approach can maintain the longitudinal speed error (within 3%) and lateral stability, thereby improving the safety of the vehicles.