Fault Diagnosis and Fault Mitigation for Torque Safety of Drive-by-Wire Systems

Torque safety is one of the key elements of functional safety for future automobile development. For drive-by-wire systems that are commonly used in modern vehicles [1], [2], pedal signals are critical for the vehicle supervisory controller to generate appropriate torque request to the powertrain, in order to keep the vehicle speed as desired. Problems with pedals or pedal sensors will result in incorrect torque request sent to the drivetrain, possibly resulting in torque safety problems such as sudden unintended acceleration. This paper proposes a fault detection and isolation (FDI) strategy based on structural analysis as well as fault mitigation methods for torque safety of drive-by-wire systems, with focus on pedal mechanical stiction fault and pedal sensor faults. Before the diagnostic strategy is designed, fault modeling for these two types of faults are introduced to assist the design of diagnostic tests. In addition, for pedal mechanical stiction fault, this paper introduces an effective approach to calibrate the thresholds in the fault diagnostic system in order to achieve the desired trade-off between false alarm rate and detection delay. The detection and mitigation strategies are calibrated and validated through Model-in-the-Loop (MIL) and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulations using realistic pedal profiles from the testing results of the EcoCAR2 prototype vehicle developed at the authors’ institution.