Actuator fault estimation and fault tolerant control in three physically-linked 2WD mobile robots

Abstract

This paper presents a method for actuator fault estimation and fault tolerant control applied to a problem of trajectory tracking in a nonlinear system composed of three physically-linked two-wheel-drive (2WD) mobile robots. To track the reference trajectory, a kinematic controller is designed based on velocity requirements and a dynamic controller is designed to guarantee stability. A nonlinear adaptive observer is used for state and fault estimation. The fault tolerance is obtained by updating the dynamic control law with the fault estimates. Simulation results of the three physically-linked 2WD mobile robots illustrate the performance of the proposed method.