In-Wheel Motor Fault Diagnosis for Electric Ground Vehicles

This paper presents an in-wheel motor fault diagnosis method for fault-tolerant control of four-wheel independently driven (4WID) electric vehicles. 4WID electric vehicle is one of the promising architectures for electric ground vehicles. While such a vehicle architecture greatly increases the flexibility for vehicle control, it also raises the requirements on system reliability, safety, and fault tolerance due to the increased number of actuators. A fault diagnosis approach for finding the faulty in-wheel motor/motor driver pair is developed. The proposed diagnosis approach does not need a precise knowledge on tire-road friction coefficient (TRFC). Robustness analysis shows that the approach can work well in the presence of tire modeling errors. Simulations using a high-fidelity, CarSim, full-vehicle model indicated the effectiveness of the proposed in-wheel motor/motor driver fault diagnosis approach.