Fault recoverability and fault tolerant control for a class of interconnected nonlinear systems

This paper considers a class of interconnected nonlinear systems with reconfigurable physical couplings. Under decentralized control laws, a fault recoverability condition is provided which reveals the capability of the interconnected system to tolerate the faults under given couplings. Consequently three fault tolerant control methods are proposed that rely on both control reconfiguration and coupling topology reconfiguration. The couplings’ effect on system performance is analyzed from the overall system point of view. An example for a system with three pendulums is taken to illustrate the theoretical results.