A fault hiding approach for the sliding mode fault-tolerant control of a non-holonomic mobile robot

When mobile robots are intended to be used in hazardous environments or for long-time operations, it is needed to increase their robustness against faults. This could be achieved by means of the inclusion of Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) mechanisms. In this paper, a FTC based on fault hiding approach is proposed for a non-holonomic mobile robot. First, a Sliding Mode Controller (SMC) is designed to control the robost and to cope with modelling uncertainty. Later on, it is enhanced to take into account actuator faults leading to a fault hiding approach for the sliding mode fault-tolerant control of the robot. Results using simulated fault scenarios are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.