Actuator Fault Tolerant Control in a Team of Mobile Robots

In this paper, a fault tolerant controller is developed for loss of effectiveness actuator faults in differential drive mobile robots. Based on the extended Kalman filter technique, a joint parameter and state estimation method is used to estimate the actuator loss of effectiveness gains as the parameters of the system. The estimated gains are then used in the controller to compensate the effect of actuator faults. Moreover, a fault tolerant leader-follower controller is developed to control multiple robots moving on a desired trajectory in a formation in the presence of actuator faults in leader or followers. The proposed method is implemented on Qbot-2 and its performance is experimentally validated.