Fault-tolerant prescribed performance control of nonlinear systems with process faults and actuator failures

Abstract

This paper investigates the fault-tolerant prescribed performance control problem for a class of multiple-input single-output unknown nonlinear systems subject to process faults and actuator failures. In contrast to the related works, we consider a general class of nonlinear systems with both multiplicative nonlinearities and additive nonlinearities corrupted by the process faults; only the boundedness of the process faults and the continuity of the nonlinear functions are required, without the explicit or fixed structures of the fault functions. To conquer this problem, a less-demanding and low-complexity fault-tolerant prescribed performance control approach is proposed. The controller is independent of the specific information of faults or the system model and does not invoke fault diagnosis or neural/fuzzy approximation to acquire such knowledge. It achieves the reference tracking with the predefined rate and accuracy. A comparative simulation on a single-link robot is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.

Keywords: Actuator failures; Fault-tolerant control; Nonlinear systems; Prescribed performance; Process faults.