Sensor fault tolerant control of nonlinear Takagi–Sugeno systems. Application to vehicle lateral dynamics

This paper presents a new scheme for sensor fault tolerant control for nonlinear systems based on the Takagi–Sugeno modeling. First, a structured residual generator aimed at detecting and isolating sensor faults is designed. A bank of observers controlled either by only one system output or a set of outputs is then implemented, leading to a set of state estimates. The parallel distributed compensation structure is adopted to design the fault tolerant controller. The novelty in this paper is that the estimated state used in the controller is a weighted state vector obtained from all the estimated states provided by the different observers. The weighting functions depend on the residual vector signals delivered by the residual generator. They are designed to avoid crisp switches in the control law. Indeed, the interesting feature of the proposed approach is to avoid the commonly used switching strategy. For each residual component, the greater its magnitude is, the less the weight affected to the corresponding state estimate is. Consequently, the controller only uses estimations computed on the basis of healthy measurements. The closed‐loop stability is studied with the Lyapunov theory, and the obtained conditions are expressed as a set of linear matrix inequalities. The proposed residual generation and fault tolerant controller are applied to a vehicle lateral dynamics affected by sensor faults. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.