Fault-tolerant control synthesis for a class of nonlinear systems: Sum of squares optimization approach

This paper studies the fault-tolerant control (FTC) problem for nonlinear systems, with guaranteed cost or H-infinity performance objective in the presence of actuator faults. The faulty mode is built as a mufti-model framework of the typical aberration in actuator effectiveness. The novelty of this paper is that the effect of the nonlinear terms is described as an index in order to transform the FTC design problem into a semi-definite programming. The proposed optimization approach is to find zero optimum for this index. Combined with other performance indexes, the conceived mufti-objective optimization problem is solved by using Sum of squares method in a reliable and efficient manner. Numerical examples are included to verify the applicability of this new approach for the nonlinear FTC synthesis. Copyright (c) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.