Passive fault-tolerant path following control of autonomous distributed drive electric vehicle considering steering system fault

•A passive fault-tolerant path following hierarchical control method of autonomous distributed drive electric vehicle is presented.•A reduced-order Kalman filter is developed to estimate vehicle sideslip angle and vehicle steering system fault.•A sliding mode controller is designed to improve vehicle stability and ensure path following accuracy at the same time.•A novel adaptive orientated tire force allocation method is proposed. In the path following process, once vehicle steering system fails, the common path following control system will not work properly, and even worse, the vehicle will be seriously deviated from the ideal path and the risk of vehicle instability will also increase. Reliable fault-tolerant control strategy can promote the autonomous vehicle to maintain stability and path following accuracy in case of failure. In this paper, a passive fault-tolerant path following control method of autonomous distributed drive electric vehicle is presented considering the vehicle steering system fault. The reduced-order Kalman filter is applied to estimate the vehicle sideslip angle and the vehicle steering system fault. The hierarchical control strategy was developed, and in the upper layer controller, the adaptive sliding mode control method is proposed to facilitate the fault-tolerant path following controller and used to improve the lateral stability and anti-roll performance of vehicle and ensure path following accuracy at the same time, using the estimated sideslip angle and steering system fault as inputs. In the lower layer controller, a novel adaptive orientated tire force allocation method is proposed to execute the control efforts of upper layer controller. The simulations are implemented in the CarSim-Simulink co-simulation platform, and the effectiveness of proposed fault-tolerant path following control method is verified.