Towards Simultaneous Actuator and Sensor Faults Estimation for a Class of Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy Systems: A Twin-Rotor System Application

The paper is devoted to the problem of estimating simultaneously states, as well as actuator and sensor faults for Takagi–Sugeno systems. The proposed scheme is intended to cope with multiple sensor and actuator faults. To achieve such a goal, the original Takagi–Sugeno system is transformed into a descriptor one containing all state and fault variables within an extended state vector. Moreover, to facilitate the overall design procedure an auxiliary fault vector is introduced. In comparison to the approaches proposed in the literature, a usual restrictive assumption concerning fixed fault rate of change is removed. Finally, the robust convergence of the whole observer is guaranteed by the so-called quadratic boundedness approach which assumes that process and measurement uncertainties are unknown but bounded within an ellipsoid. The last part of the paper portrays an exemplary application concerning a nonlinear twin-rotor system.