Active fault-tolerant control for the dual-valve hydraulic system with unknown dead-zone

This paper proposes a method for high-performance motion control of the dual-valve hydraulic system subject to parameter and model uncertainties, unknown proportional valve dead-zone, and servo valve fault. By constructing a detailed dual-valve fault system model (DFSM), a disturbance observer-based adaptive robust fault-tolerant controller is proposed via the backstepping method. This controller integrates a model-based fault detection algorithm for real-time fault monitoring and subsequent controller reconfiguration. Additionally, the DFSM-based adaptive robust control (ARC) technique is applied to handle the unknown dead-zone problem and other nonlinearities, ensuring precise control. Once the servo valve fault occurs, a nonlinear observer estimates the fault and collaborates with the ARC to establish a reconfigured controller, thereby maintaining motion control. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been experimentally verified.