Reference Trajectories for Investigating Fault-Tolerant Trajectory Tracking Control Algorithms for Automated Vehicles

The automation of road vehicles implies highest demands for all parts involved in the driving task, including the vehicle actuators. Fault-tolerant trajectory tracking, which exploits functional redundancies among the vehicle actuators, bears the potential to avoid fail-operational requirements on actuator level. Yet, the use of fault-tolerant trajectory tracking must be well argued as the number of possible driving scenarios of automated vehicles is virtually unlimited. We present a reference trajectory generation approach in order to support such a safety argumentation. The generation essentially respects functional limits of the specific vehicle automation application, e.g., maximum speed or lateral acceleration. Derived from standard maneuvers of automated vehicles, the trajectories are generated with varying paths and speed profiles for the specific application. Eventually, a set of trajectories is generated for an example application and applied to investigate the potential of a selected fault-tolerant trajectory tracking approach. The simulation results for the example application reveal the shortcomings of the selected fault-tolerant trajectory tracking algorithm. However, these results also indicate that fault-tolerant trajectory tracking can be employed within the example application once the shortcomings of the algorithm are resolved.