Distributed active fault tolerant control design against actuator faults for multiple mobile robots

This paper investigates the active fault tolerant cooperative control problem for a team of wheeled mobile robots whose actuators are subjected to partial or severe faults during the team mission. The cooperative robots network only requires the interaction between local neighbors over the undirected graph and does not assume the existence of leaders in the network. We assume that the communication exists all the time during the mission. To avoid the system’s deterioration in the event of a fault, a set of extended Kalman filters (EKFs) are employed to monitor the actuators’ behavior for each robot. Then, based on the online information given by the EKFs, a reconfigurable sliding mode control is proposed to take an appropriate action to accommodate that fault. In this research study, two types of faults are considered. The first type is a partial actuator fault in which the faulty actuator responds to a partial of its control input, but still has the capability to continue the mission when the control law is reconfigured. In addition, the controllers of the remaining healthy robots are reconfigured simultaneously to move within the same capability of the faulty one. The second type is a severe actuator fault in which the faulty actuator is subjected to a large loss of its control input, and that lead the exclusion of that faulty robot from the team formation. Consequently, the remaining healthy robots update their reference trajectories and form a new formation shape to achieve the rest of the team mission.