Redundant Dissimilar Sensor Fusion With Dynamic Driver Input Classification and Graceful Degradation for Drive-by-Wire Applications

Dissimilar sensor redundancy with force and displacement measurements can provide extended fault coverage for drive-by-wire applications. However, large variances occur when correlating these inputs in dynamic measurements. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel fault tolerant sensor fusion concept to fuse redundant kinetic and kinematic sensors dynamically and accurately. It consists of a driver input condition classifier, and a graceful degradation scheme voter. The classifier determines the states of several driver input conditions in real-time, which are then utilized as a pointers to allocate the best fitting driver input kinetic-kinematic response profile during dynamic operation for sensor data conversion.