Fault-tolerant control using sliding mode techniques applied to multi-motor electric vehicle

This paper proposes the concepts of sliding mode schemes for fault tolerant control. The theoretical ideas developed in the paper were applied to a multi-motor electric vehicle (EV). To address this problem, we started by revisiting the modeling of vehicle dynamics focusing on nonlinear single-track model. The vehicle response to external perturbation forces, which are generated by unbalanced right and left traction forces due to malfunctions in motor drive, is described using the transfer functions analysis. The designing of a sliding mode controller for handling faults is described. The proposed scheme shows that certain motor drive failures can be handled directly without reconfiguring the controller. Simulation results obtained with CarSim vehicle model show the effectiveness of the fault tolerant control in various driving scenarios.