A Unified Approach towards Fault Detection of Vehicle Lateral Dynamics Sensors

Vehicle dynamics control (VDC) systems require a close monitoringof the included sensors since an erroneous control interventiondue to faulty measurements may have fatal consequences. Hardwarefailures with an immediate impact on sensor signals are detectedby build-in sensor tests and a plausibility check of electricalsignals. Slowly growing sensor offsets require model basedmonitoring. Actually, simple stationary models are used to detectslow changes. However, simplicity must be compensated for by anexcessive exception handling to avoid false alarms. In this paper,an invariant relation for the signals capturing vehicle lateraldynamics is derived. Based on this relation a novel scheme for VDCsensor monitoring is proposed which drastically reduces thenecessary exception handling and which keeps up simultaneouslywith the advantage of simple models.