Friction compensation as a fault-tolerant control problem

Abstract

The control of systems that involve friction presents interesting challenges. Recent research has focused on detailed modelling of friction phenomena in order to use robust on-line friction compensation procedures, attempting to cancel out the friction force effect in the feedback control of a mechanical or mechatronic system. However, the friction modelling problem remains a very difficult challenge and this article proposes a new approach to friction compensation which is based on the theory of robust fault estimation. The friction forces acting in a dynamic system can be viewed as actuator faults with time-varying characteristics to be estimated and compensated within an output feedback fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme, so that the limitations arising from the use of a friction model are obviated. The friction (fault) estimation problem is hence embedded inside a control system with required stability, and performance robustness. This can be a significant advantage over well-known model-based friction compensation methods in which detailed modelling of friction phenomena is essential and for which robustness with respect to friction characteristics is difficult to achieve using non-linear models.