Prescribed performance adaptive fault‐tolerant control for nonlinear systems with actuator faults and input dead‐zone

Abstract This paper investigates the prescribed performance adaptive fault‐tolerant control problem for nonlinear systems with actuator faults and input dead‐zone (IDZ). The partial loss of effectiveness fault and bias fault are considered. First, the asymmetric nonlinear IDZ is transformed into an affine function in the backstepping process. Second, the radial basis function neural network technique is applied to deal with the unknown uncertainty of the studied system. The state observer is designed to estimate the unmeasurable states in the nonlinear systems. Third, a fault‐tolerant controller is developed such that all signals are semi‐globally uniformly ultimately bounded for the closed‐loop system, and the tracking error remains within the specified performance requirements even though the actuator faults and IDZ occur. Finally, an electromechanical system example is provided to exhibit the utilizability of the obtained control technique.