Finite-Time Fault-Tolerant Integrated Motion Control for Autonomous Vehicles With Prescribed Performance

Vehicle-integrated motion control (IMC) with the capability to enhance the overall performance by considering the couplings and interactions among various subsystems is an active and open issue. This article proposes a novel finite-time lateral and longitudinal IMC scheme to bypass the resulting complex nonlinearities on the basis of time-delay estimation (TDE). The precise tracking of reference trajectory is achieved where the transient errors are limited to the designed prescribed performance functions (PPFs). The expected steady-state region can be entered in a fixed time, and then the state errors convergence to zero asymptotically. Meanwhile, actuator faults and external disturbance, for autonomous vehicles (AVs) equipped with abundant actuators, are frequently encountered in practice. The presented controller incorporating fault-tolerant ability and disturbance rejection is implemented to further optimize the robustness and reliability. In particular, no auxiliary approximate mechanism or additional prior knowledge is needed. The simulation results for standard maneuvers and planned trajectory tracking are conducted to demonstrate the benefits of the constructed integrated control scheme, in terms of tracking performance (position tracking error dropped over 70%), handling (yaw rate tracing error dropped over 10%), and stability (vehicle sideslip angle dropped over 70%).