Auxiliary fault tolerant control with actuator amplitude saturation and limited rate

In this paper, the problem of fault tolerant tracking control for a linear time-invariant system subject to actuator faults and saturations is addressed. An auxiliary system is developed to ensure actuators behave within amplitude and rate limits under the influence of partial loss of control effectiveness. Based on the auxiliary system, a fault tolerant compensation controller is constructed to guarantee tracking errors to converge to a small region. Some relationships among tracking errors, command signals, actuator faults, amplitude and rate limits as well as controller parameters are comprehensively studied and explicitly illustrated with formulas. An example of rudder-roll damping control for a cruise keeping ship is included to illustrate the proposed procedures and their effectiveness.