Neural-Network-Based Fault-Tolerant Control for Nonlinear Systems Subjected to Faults and Saturations

Abstract This paper investigates a novel strategy which can address the fault-tolerant control (FTC) problem for nonlinear strict-feedback systems containing actuator saturation, unknown external disturbances, and faults related to actuators and components. In such method, the unknown dynamics including faults and disturbances are approximated by resorting to Neural-Networks (NNs) technique. Meanwhile, a back-stepping technique is employed to build a fault-tolerant controller. It should be stressed that the main advantage of this strategy is that the NN weights are updated online based on gradient descent (GD) algorithm by minimizing the cost function with respect to NNs approximation error rather than regarding weights as adaptive parameters, which are designed according to Lyapunov theory. In addition, the convergence proof of NN weights and the stability proof of the proposed FTC method are given. Finally, simulation is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in dealing with unknown external disturbances, actuator saturation and the faults related to the components and actuators, simultaneously.