Fault-tolerant control of mechanical systems

Abstract

Fault tolerance attempts to provide for uninterrupted system operation even when one or more of a system's components fail. This is accomplished by continuously monitoring the state of each of the components. Upon detection of a failure, the recovery process makes decisions for the reallocation of the resources, and then announces the new task assignments in order to recover the system from failure as gracefully as possible. While the recovery process takes place, usually the post-failure system is not the same system before failure. Hence, a new controller design is usually required in the recovery process. This work examines controllers based on adaptive parameter estimation, sliding control and computed-torque method for their potential use in fault-tolerant controller design of mechanical systems such as serial and parallel mechanisms.