Robust fault-tolerant control for four-wheel individually actuated electric vehicle considering driver steering characteristics

•The steering characteristics of the driver are considered in the fault-tolerant control.•The feedback linearization is used to deal with the nonlinearity of the driver-vehicle system.•Integrating feedback linearization and terminal sliding mode control improves robustness.•The cooperative game theory is adopted to model the interaction among various control targets. A robust fault-tolerant control scheme for distributed actuated electric vehicles is proposed to maintain vehicle stability suffering actuator faults while considering the driver personality differences. The proposed scheme integrates the cooperative game and terminal sliding mode control into the framework of the feedback linearization method (FLM). Firstly, the nonlinearities of the driver-vehicle system are treated by the knowledge of Lie derivative, and then a set of controllable virtual subsystems is obtained through diffeomorphism. To achieve multi-objective cooperation, the interaction framework of virtual subsystems is modeled based on cooperative game theory, which provides a basic feedback control scheme (BFCS). Finally, a terminal sliding mode technology-based active compensation control scheme is integrated into BFCS to handle the systemic disturbances caused by actuator faults. An implementation of hardware-in-the-loop verifies that the stability of the vehicle under the control of the developed approach can be guaranteed for different drivers and different fault types.