Actuator and sensor fault detection and isolation of an actuated seat via nonlinear multi-observers

In this paper, a model-based approach to detect and to isolate sensors and actuators faults using nonlinear sliding mode observers is proposed for an actuated seat. The goal is to ensure the comfort and the security of the users in simulators applications. The principle is to reconstruct the state vector of the system by sliding mode observers and to compare the estimated outputs with those measured as residuals. In this work, a multi-observers technique is used. It consists of designing multiple observers such that each observer must be robust to noises and to other uncertainties but sensitive to each actuator or sensor fault. Simulation results are given to show the effectiveness of the approach.