Towards Robust Simultaneous Actuator and Sensor Fault Estimation for a Class of Nonlinear Systems: Design and Comparison

This paper aims at providing two competitive solutions to the problem of estimating state as well as sensor and actuator faults. The development starts with a common system description, which is transformed into a nonlinear descriptor system-like form. The appealing property of such an approach is that the sensor fault is eliminated from the output equation by suitably extending the state vector. Subsequently, a novel fault estimation scheme is proposed and its error dynamics are carefully described. Having such a unified framework, two competitive design procedures are proposed. One is based on the celebrated H
_∞
while the other employs the quadratic boundedness strategy. With the estimators, the paper provides a unified framework for assessing the uncertainty of the resulting estimates in the form of uncertainty intervals. Thus, both solutions can be compared from the theoretical perspective. The final part of the paper contains a numerical simulation example concerning a twin-rotor system that clearly shows the comparison and performance of the above approaches. Subsequently, an experimental study concerning a multi-tank system using real data is reported.