Fault Detection and Performance Recovery Design With Deferred Actuator Replacement via a Low-Computation Method

In this paper, for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems, a low-computation design scheme for fault detection and performance recovery based on deferred replacement actuators is proposed. Different from the existing two mainstream adaptive fault-tolerant control schemes, the proposed method does not require prior knowledge of fault models, nor does it require multiple actuators working in parallel simultaneously to mitigate the impact of faults. The disadvantage of the former is that most of the considered fault models cannot cover all fault types, while the latter adds unnecessary wear and tear to actuators that do not generate faults. In order to overcome the shortcomings of the existing fault-tolerant control, a method with deferred actuator replacement is proposed. By designing a fault detection function and a shifting function, new error variables are reconstructed to achieve performance recovery. In addition, a computationally efficient design scheme is established through the idea of constraint control. Unlike the existing advanced technology, firstly, dealing with the problem of complexity explosion from a new perspective and ensuring the rationality of assumptions; secondly, analyze the controllability of system states during the deferred replacement stage. Finally, simulation results on a twin otter aircraft system verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Note to Practitioners
—For widely used modern control systems such as aircraft systems, self-driving systems, etc., it is extremely difficult to diagnose and repair the sudden fault behavior in a short time, and in this process, the adverse impact caused by the serious decline of the system performance is huge. Inspired by the practical application of airbus states in the flight control system, a fault-tolerant control scheme of deferred replacement actuators is designed in this paper. In addition, by designing a low-computation control scheme, the assumptions that are difficult to achieve in practice are relaxed, and the structure of the controller is very simple without the help of any auxiliary design. After fault detection, the replacement actuators strategy successfully realizes the recovery of the system performance within the specified time.