A fault-tolerant steering control design for automatic path tracking in autonomous vehicles

In this paper, a model reference based adaptive controller with look-ahead technology is proposed for the automatic steering of autonomous vehicles in the presence of actuator faults. Following fault detection by an adaptive diagnostic observer, the proposed controller adaptively changes the control technique to compensate for the loss of actuator effectiveness. The proposed method was applied to a ground vehicle following a rigid square wave shaped road under different faulty conditions in the steering actuator. Simplicity of the overall scheme, the speed by which the system is able to recover from the fault and excellent tracking performance under faulty conditions are the main positive features of the proposed approach.