Distributed Fault-Tolerant State Estimation for a Class of Nonlinear Systems Over Sensor Networks With Sensor Faults and Random Link Failures

This article is concerned with the problem of distributed fault-tolerant state estimation for sector-bounded nonlinear systems over sensor networks. The advantage of the distributed fault-tolerant state estimation algorithm is that the estimator can have the given $H_\infty$ performance in the simultaneous presence of sensor faults and communication link failures. Based on the fault-diagnosis technique, the sensor fault of each sensor node is detected and estimated by the designed fault-diagnosis unit. The temporary communication link failures are modeled as a set of independent random variables obeying the Bernoulli distribution. Subsequently, the active fault-tolerant estimation scheme is established and several sufficient conditions are obtained, which guarantee the $H_\infty$ performance of estimation error system and the detectability of sensor faults. Finally, an illustrative example is provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.