Fault-tolerant control for an electro-hydraulic servo system with sensor fault compensation and disturbance rejection

Abstract

The electro-hydraulic servo system (EHSS) usually faces multiple sensor faults and disturbances, which is difficult to achieve good tracking control, reliability, and stability control. In this article, an advanced fault-tolerant controller is proposed for an EHSS to deal with the above challenge. The three fault observers, called nonlinear unknown input observers (NUIOs), are developed to effectively estimate the position, velocity, pressure sensor faults and the system states. The fault detection, estimation, and isolation are then presented as effective for multiple sensors failure at a time. The first NUIO for position sensor fault is utilized for the tracking control, while the other NUIOs are used for alarm proposal. The adverse effects caused by the matched and unmatched disturbances are eliminated by two extended state observers (ESOs). In addition, to avoid the “explosion of complexity” when computing the derivatives of virtual control laws, the dynamic surface control is applied to design the fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme. The Lyapunov principle ensures system stability under lumped disturbance and faulty conditions. Finally, simulation studies and evaluation results are performed to demonstrate the validity of the proposed FTC algorithm.