Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Control Design for Car-Like Vehicles Subject to Actuator Faults and Fading Channels

This brief addresses the problem of fault-tolerant cooperative control (FTCC) for a group of car-like vehicles experiencing actuator faults. The main feature of this study is the transmission of vehicle’s state information via fading channels. It is challenging to compensate for actuator faults and maintain vehicle’s stability in the presence of unreliable communication links. To cope with such fault conditions, this work introduces an integral terminal sliding mode control developed by means of received faded neighborhood state information. The fading channel’s effect and the nonlinearity of vehicle dynamics are carefully analyzed by providing rigorous proofs with the Lyapunov stability theorem. In this study, the settling time function relies on design parameters rather than the initial states, which is essential for real applications. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is validated in a real system using the latest Quanser self-driving car (QCar) platform.