Robust Fault Estimation and Fault-Tolerant Control for Discrete-Time Systems Subject to Periodic Disturbances

To enhance the reliability of digital automation systems in the Industry 4.0 era, this paper investigates a robust fault-tolerant control scheme in the discrete-time domain subject to periodic disturbances, consisting of a fault estimator, dynamic disturbance compensation loop, and fault-tolerant controller. The fault estimator simultaneously estimates both the system states and actuator/sensor faults. The existence and stability conditions of the proposed estimator are given, and a robust design method is proposed to make the state estimates robust to disturbances. To further reduce the estimation errors caused by periodic disturbances, a novel disturbance compensation loop is introduced and is optimized by a joint zero-assignment and pole-optimization method to delicately compensate for the adverse impacts of periodic input disturbances. The proposed robust fault-tolerant controller uses fault estimation to ensure fast recovery in the event of bounded actuator/sensor faults. The proposed scheme is evaluated through simulations of a two-wheeled mobile robot subject to periodic disturbances and simultaneous abrupt inclination angular sensor and ramp actuator faults, where its performance is shown to exceed that of existing methods.