Fault-tolerant control of switched nonlinear systems with strong structural uncertainties: Average dwell-time method

This paper presents a robust fault-tolerant control method for a class of uncertain switched systems with strong structural uncertainties using average dwell-time method. Due to the nature of average dwell-time techniques and the representation of actuator faults, this paper has the following features compared with the existing methods in the literature: 1) the proposed controller exponentially stabilizes this class of nonlinear systems containing strong uncertainties with actuator faults and its nominal (i.e., without actuator faults) systems without necessarily changing any structures and/or parameters of the proposed controllers; 2) the proposed method is independent of arbitrary switching polices provided that switching is on-the-average slow enough; 3) the proposed method treats all actuators in a unified way without necessarily classifying all actuators into faulty actuators and healthy ones. A numerical example is provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.