Observer-Based Finite-Time Fault-Tolerant Control for Nonstrict-Feedback Nonlinear Systems With Multiple Uncertainties

In the fault-tolerant control (FTC) tasks of nonstrict-feedback nonlinear systems, unmeasurable states, disturbance, and actuator faults are recognized as the main factors that obstacle the effective controller design and, thus, the tracking performance improvement. To tackle these obstructions, a fuzzy observer is introduced to address the difficulties of the unmeasurable states involving nonstrict-feedback nonlinear systems by benefiting from the approximation property of fuzzy logic systems. Owing to the newly employed damping term in the intermediate control law being utilized to compensate for the possibly unlimited number of faults, the proposed FTC strategy is able to deal with actuator faults properly without imposing tighter requirements on the fault mechanism. To reach fast transient performance, stability of finite time is reached by exploiting the backstepping method. The investigated strategy ensures that all the responses of the systems are semiglobal practical finite-time stable. Meanwhile, the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood of the origin within finite time. In addition, to demonstrate its effectiveness, the provided approach is applied to the position tracking of a robotic system, which shows anticipated control performances in spite of various uncertainties.