An Efficient Fault Tolerant Control Scheme for Euler–Lagrange Systems

Abstract Every closed-loop system holds a level of fault tolerance, which could be increased by using a fault tolerant control (FTC) scheme. In this paper, an efficient FTC scheme for a class of nonlinear systems (Euler–Lagrange ones) is proposed, which guarantees high performance and stability in a faulty system. This scheme was designed on the basis of a cascade control structure in which the inner loop is the closed-loop system and the external loop is the FTC, a generalized proportional integral (GPI) observer-based controller, which manages the fault tolerance level increment. An important issue of the proposed scheme is that the GPI observer-based controller jointly estimates disturbances and faults, providing information about the state of health of the system, and then compensates their effect. The scheme is efficient because only the inertia matrix is required for the controller design, it is able to preserve the nominal control law unchanged and can operate properly without explicit information about system faults (fault diagnostic module). Simulation results, on a pendulum model, show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme for tracking control.