Smart structure with self-maintenance for the characteristics variation

This paper describes a concept of self-maintenance for self-sensing actuation system and shows how system identification and state estimation can be used to achieve self-maintenance. Currently, self-sensing systems having concurrent actuation and sensing can be made by using a bridge circuit. However, the hardware tuning is still needed due to the unstable nature of an imbalanced bridge circuit. This problem becomes serious in the space environment where human beings may not be available to perform the maintenance. A method of achieving self-sensing actuation without a bridge circuit is proposed in this study. Dynamics of this proposed system can be described as the state space expression with a direct transmission component. This means that the problem of balancing the bridge circuit is equivalent to the system identification and state estimation problem. The proposed method was verified with experimental results, demonstrating that smart structures can achieve self-maintenance.