Fault-tolerant control of linear systems using adaptive virtual actuator

In this paper, design and development of fault-tolerant control (FTC) is investigated for linear systems subject to loss of effectiveness and time-varying additive actuator faults as well as an external disturbance using the fault-hiding approach. The main aim of this approach is to keep the nominal controller and to design a virtual actuator that is inserted between the faulty plant and the nominal controller in order to hide actuator faults and disturbances from the nominal controller, and consequently the performance of the system before and after the occurrence of actuator faults is kept to be the same. The proposed adaptive virtual actuator does not require a separated fault detection, isolation and identification (FDII) unit and both state and output feedback cases are considered. An illustrative example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive virtual actuator in both cases.