Full-order observer-based actuator fault detection and reduced-order observer-based fault reconstruction for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems

This paper considers observer-based actuator fault detection and reconstruction problems for uncertain nonlinear systems. Based on a kind of full-order observer which is robust to disturbances but sensitive to actuator faults, a single detection observer is constructed to produce a residual which can be used to alarm the occurrence of the actuator faults when at least one actuator fault occurs indeed. The full-order observer is adaptive one because an adaptation law which can adjust the Lipschitz constant of Lipschitz term is introduced. For this reason, the Lipschitz constant can be unknown in our design. After this, a kind of reduced-order observer is developed by choosing a special observer gain matrix. Based on the reduced-order observer, we provide a kind of unknown information estimating method which can be used to not only reconstruct the actuator faults but also estimate the disturbances of the system. In simulation, a real model of the seventh-order aircraft is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.