Robust adaptive fault-tolerant control of dynamic systems with floating nonlinearities and fading actuators

This paper is concerned with tracking control designs for a class of dynamic systems involving floating structures, external disturbances, actuator failures and input nonlinearities with non-symmetric saturation and dead-zones. A robust adaptive control approach is proposed to cope with these factors concurrently. The resultant control scheme exhibits the following features: 1) simple structure with inexpensive on-line computations and nonrestrictive design parameters to be specified; 2) no need for tedious/complicated design procedure or analytic estimation/ approximation in control setup; 3) no need for precise information on the floating nonlinearities nor fault magnitude or fault occurrence time instance; and 4) little re-design/ re-programming needed for wide operation conditions. These features, quite favorable for practical implementation, are deemed essential in building more user/designer friendly and less expensive control schemes for practical dynamic systems.