Fault-Tolerant Trajectory Tracking for Unmanned Ground Vehicles via Virtual Error-Based Prescribed Performance Control

The problem of trajectory tracking for the underactuated unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) subject to sensor faults is explored in this paper. It is focused on the case of the sensor measurements with time-varying drift and bias and the UGV with unknown nonlinear dynamics and inputs coupling, which render the related solutions infeasible. To conquer this challenge, a novel fault-tolerant prescribed performance control approach via a virtual errors-based recursive design is put forward. It steers the UGV to track the target trajectory with the preassigned rate and accuracy, versus the sensor faults, unknown dynamics and exogenous disturbances. Moreover, no attempt is made for fault diagnosis, disturbance estimation, function approximation, or parameter identification, leading to a control simplicity.