A novel fault-tolerant sensor system for sensor drift compensation

The conventional fault-tolerant sensor systems would fail when outputs from incorporated sensors are either noisy or drifting. This paper presents a novel real-time fault compensation method, which uses state estimation and compensation techniques, that the sensor system can perform robust measurements even when outputs from every incorporated sensor are noisy and drifting. In a simulation example, the proposed design can detect and correct the sensor errors (dc bias and drift) in real time. For the dc bias, the minimum detectable offset value is 0.1, which is the same as the standard deviation of the sensor noise. The compensated sensor output is biased at values smaller than 0.02. For the sensor drifts, the proposed method can compensate drifts for the change rate of drifts up to four times faster than that of the signal to be measured. The highest change rate of drifts, that can be compensated by this method, is determined by the standard deviation of the sensor noise. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.