Internal model based fault tolerant control of a robot manipulator

In this paper an implicit fault tolerant control scheme is specialized for an n-dof fully actuated mechanical manipulator subject to various sinusoidal torque disturbances acting on joints. More in detail we show how a standard tracking controller can be "augmented" with an internal model unit designed so as to compensate the unknown spurious torque harmonics. In this way the controller is proved to be global implicitly fault tolerant to all the faults belonging to the model embedded in the regulator. Moreover simply testing the state of the internal model we will show how to perform fault detection and isolation.