Robust adaptive fault-tolerant control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with multiple time delays

This study is concerned with the problem of robust adaptive fuzzy fault-tolerant control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with mismatching parameter uncertainties, external disturbances, multiple state time delays perturbations and actuator failures, which include loss of effectiveness, outage and stuck modes. A novel direct adaptive fuzzy tracking control scheme is developed to achieve the fault-tolerant control objective. First, by introducing a positive nonlinear control gain function, the effects of state time delays and actuator failures are effectively compensated. Then, a suitable fuzzy logic system (FLS), which is used to approximate the corresponding nonlinear function, is constructed to eliminate the influences on mismatched parameter uncertainty and external disturbance. Moreover, it is shown that all the closed-loop system signals are uniformly bounded and that the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood of the origin via Lyapunov–Krasovskii stability analysis. Finally, the proposed adaptive fuzzy fault-tolerant tracking design approach is illustrated on a two stage chemical reactor system with delayed recycle streams.