Fault-tolerant path-tracking control of autonomous electric ground vehicles with lateral prescribed performance

To improve the performance and robustness of autonomous electric ground vehicles, we present a novel triple-step control architecture employing a lateral prescribed performance scheme to design an adaptive fault-tolerant controller to realize the nonlinear path-tracking manoeuvers against uncertainties, disturbances and even a total failure of steering capability. It is proved that the closed-loop system based on the developed control framework guarantees a regulation of the lateral offset with prescribed performance. The major advantage over conventional path-tracking control frameworks is that our approach can guarantee both the transient and the steady-state performance of the system under a broad range of driving conditions with robustness to model uncertainties, disturbances and even faults. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme.