A complete fault diagnostic system for automated vehicles operating in a platoon

A “complete” fault diagnostic system is developed for automated vehicles operating as a platoon on an automated highway system. The diagnostic system is designed to monitor the complete set of sensors and actuators used by the lateral and longitudinal controllers of the vehicle, including radar sensors, magnetometers and inter-vehicle communication systems. A fault in any of the twelve sensors and three actuators is identified without requiring any additional hardware redundancy. The diagnostic system uses parity equations and several reduced-order nonlinear observers constructed from a simplified dynamic model of the vehicle. Nonlinear observer design techniques are used to guarantee asymptotically stable convergence of estimates for the nonlinear dynamic system. Different combinations of the observer estimates and the available sensor measurements are then processed to construct a bank of residues. The paper analytically shows that a fault in any one of the sensors or actuators creates a unique subset of these residues to grow so as to enable exact identification of the faulty component. Both simulation and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the fault diagnostic system in the presence of various faults