Fault tolerant nonlinear control with applications to an automated transit bus

This paper presents an integrated structure for a passive and active fault tolerant control (FTC) design approach in the framework of a robust nonlinear control technique called Dynamic Surface Control (DSC). As motivated by the automated vehicle application, we consider two categories of possible faults: pre-specified (a priori) and non-specified faults. It is first shown that DSC can be considered as a passive FTC approach in the sense that it gives simultaneous robust stability to a set of nonlinear systems even in the presence of model uncertainties and the pre-specified faults. Then, the non-specified fault is classified depending on the fault’s impact on the closed-loop system and isolatability from a fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) system. If a fault is both intolerable and isolatable, an active FTC approach is taken which includes FDD and controller reconfiguration. More specifically, trajectory reconfiguration is considered to accommodate the actuator fault, i.e., to compensate for the performance loss due to the fault within the framework of a switched hierarchical structure. Finally, the integrated structure for the longitudinal control of an automated transit bus is designed through the proposed method. Simulation results of the fault tolerant controller are shown for both single and multiple multiplicative faults. This controller was implemented on the California PATH transit buses in a demonstration of automated public transportation technology in San Diego, California in August of 2003.