Advanced Adaptive Control Strategies for Fault Tolerance and Cybersecurity in Autonomous Vehicles

As autonomous vehicles play an increasingly vital role in critical sectors such as transportation, logistics, and defense, ensuring their operational safety and security becomes paramount. These vehicles are susceptible to both physical faults, such as actuator failures, and cyberattacks, including denial-of-service, deception, and replay attacks. Traditional fault-tolerant control (FTC) systems focus on physical faults but often overlook cyber threats that can compromise vehicle safety and performance. This article presents an adaptive FTC framework that integrates an intrusion detection and protection system with control design to address these challenges. The framework enables real-time threat detection and dynamic control adaptation to ensure vehicle resilience under compromised conditions. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through real-time experiments with Quanser QCar vehicles, confirming its capability to mitigate cyber–physical threats. This work advances secure autonomous systems by providing a comprehensive solution addressing both physical and cyber vulnerabilities, thereby enhancing overall safety and security.