A virtual actuator approach for the fault tolerant control of unstable linear systems subject to actuator saturation and fault isolation delay

This paper presents a fault tolerant control (FTC) strategy for unstable linear systems subject to actuator saturation and fault isolation delay. The solution relies on virtual actuators, an active fault-hiding method that reconfigures the faulty plant instead of the controller. The main contribution of the paper consists in the design of the virtual actuators with guarantees that, if at the fault isolation time the closed-loop system state is inside a region defined by a value of the Lyapunov function, the state trajectory will converge to zero despite the appearance of faults within a predefined set. In addition, the design of the nominal controller is performed so as to maximize the tolerated delay between the fault occurence and its isolation. Finally, the theoretical results are demonstrated and illustrated using an example. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.