Development of a Control System for an Urban Electric Vehicle Compatible with Autonomous Driving Features

As cities continue to grow, the roads only become more congested, leading drivers to spend more time commuting, while vehicle accidents continue to rise. The Mechatronics Vehicle Systems Laboratory has developed its own urban electric vehicle in an attempt to combat congestion, as well as pollution concerns in urban areas. The focus of these thesis is a fault tolerant control system to improve the robustness of the vehicle, as well as allow for future autonomous vehicle functions to be tested on it. The development of the control system began with deriving the requirements from the vehicle’s hardware, the goal of the project and foreseeable changes in the future. From there, the processors were selected, electronic control units were ordered, the vehicle’s necessarily electrical connections were completed, and the control software was deigned. Once every part of the project was completed, the control system was integrated, and testing was completed at the university. The goal of the control software was to allow the vehicle to be drivable if a motor, motor controller or steering actuator failed due to an electrical, mechanical or feedback fault. Due to the vehicle’s modular design it allowed other components to compensate for failures, while maintaining vehicle controllability and predictable vehicle dynamics. Furthermore, the control system allows for autonomous vehicle functions to be added and tested on the vehicle. This was tested through the addition of a lane following models, along with the control system’s path following function. The developed control system was shown to improve vehicle controllability when faults occurred, as well as allowed lane following to work effectively with the system structure and communication channels chosen. Overall, validating the design as well as allowing future mechanical designs or autonomous functions to be tested on the vehicle

Integration of fault tolerance and hardware redundancy techniques into the design of mobile platforms

This work addresses the development of a fault-tolerant mobile platform. Fault-tolerant mechanical system design is an emerging technology that attempts to build highly reliable systems by incorporating hardware and software architectures. For this purpose, previous work in fault-tolerant were reviewed. Alternate architectures were evaluated to maximize the fault tolerance capabilities of the driving and steering systems of a mobile platform. The literature review showed that most of the research work on fault tolerance has been done in the area of kinematics and control systems of robotic arms. Therefore, hardware redundancy and fault tolerance in mobile robots is an area to be researched. The prototype constructed as part of this work demonstrated basic principles and uses of a fault-tolerant mechanism, and is believed to be the first such system in its class. It is recommended that different driving and steering architectures, and the fault-tolerant controllers\u27 performance be tested on this prototype

Adaptive Sliding Mode Fault Tolerant Control for Autonomous Vehicle With Unknown Actuator Parameters and Saturated Tire Force Based on the Center of Percussion

With consideration of tire force saturation in vehicle motions, a novel path-following controller is developed for autonomous vehicles with unknown-bound disturbances and unknown actuator parameters. An adaptive sliding-mode fault-tolerant control (ASM-FTC) strategy is designed to stabilize the path-following errors without any information of disturbance boundaries, actuator fault boundaries and steering ratio from the steering wheel to the front wheels. By selecting the distance from the center of gravity to the center of percussion as the preview length, the effects of the lateral rear-tire force are decoupled and cancelled out, and then the preview error, which represents the path-following performance, can be only commanded by the front-tire force. To further address the issue of unknown tire-road friction limits, a modified ASM-FTC strategy is presented to improve the path-following performance as the lateral tire force is saturated. Simulation results show that the modified ASM-FTC controller demonstrates superior tracking performance over the normal ASM-FTC while the autonomous vehicle follows desired paths

Feasible, Robust and Reliable Automation and Control for Autonomous Systems

The Special Issue book focuses on highlighting current research and developments in the automation and control field for autonomous systems as well as showcasing state-of-the-art control strategy approaches for autonomous platforms. The book is co-edited by distinguished international control system experts currently based in Sweden, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom, with contributions from reputable researchers from China, Austria, France, the United States of America, Poland, and Hungary, among many others. The editors believe the ten articles published within this Special Issue will be highly appealing to control-systems-related researchers in applications typified in the fields of ground, aerial, maritime vehicles, and robotics as well as industrial audiences

Yaw Rate Control and Actuator Fault Detection and Isolation for a Four Wheel Independent Drive Electric Vehicle

In this paper, a new actuator fault detection and isolation method for a four wheel independent drive electric vehicle is proposed. Also, a controller based on sliding mode control method is proposed for lateral stability of the vehicle. The proposed control method is designed in three high, medium and low levels. At the high-level, the vehicle desired dynamics such as longitudinal speed reference and yaw rate reference are determined. The medium-level is designed to achieve desired traction force and yaw moment based on the sliding mode control. At the low-level, by defining and optimally minimizing a cost function, proper force or torque signals are determined to apply to the wheels. Moreover, this paper also presents a new method for actuator fault detection and isolation in electric vehicles. The proposed fault detection method uses comparison of sliding ratio of different wheels. Using the proposed method, value of the actuator fault and its position are accurately estimated and diagnosed. Then, the proposed controller is modified and adapted to new conditions using the fault identification results. Finally, the validity of proposed controller is confirmed by the conducted simulations in MATLAB and CARSIM environments

Climbing and Walking Robots

Nowadays robotics is one of the most dynamic fields of scientific researches. The shift of robotics researches from manufacturing to services applications is clear. During the last decades interest in studying climbing and walking robots has been increased. This increasing interest has been in many areas that most important ones of them are: mechanics, electronics, medical engineering, cybernetics, controls, and computers. Today’s climbing and walking robots are a combination of manipulative, perceptive, communicative, and cognitive abilities and they are capable of performing many tasks in industrial and non- industrial environments. Surveillance, planetary exploration, emergence rescue operations, reconnaissance, petrochemical applications, construction, entertainment, personal services, intervention in severe environments, transportation, medical and etc are some applications from a very diverse application fields of climbing and walking robots. By great progress in this area of robotics it is anticipated that next generation climbing and walking robots will enhance lives and will change the way the human works, thinks and makes decisions. This book presents the state of the art achievments, recent developments, applications and future challenges of climbing and walking robots. These are presented in 24 chapters by authors throughtot the world The book serves as a reference especially for the researchers who are interested in mobile robots. It also is useful for industrial engineers and graduate students in advanced study

Arquitecturas de hardware para um veículo eléctrico

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201