An Integrated Sensor Fault Estimation and Fault-Tolerant Control Design Approach for Continuous-Time Switched Systems

Abstract This paper proposes a robust integrated fault estimation (FE) and fault-tolerant control (FTC) strategy for a class of continuous-time switched systems in the presence of unknown external disturbances and sensor faults. The main idea focuses on designing a switched descriptor observer to achieve simultaneous estimations of system states and sensor faults. With the acquired estimation information, an integrated development of the estimated state feedback fault-tolerant controller is constructed to compensate for the fault effects by stabilizing the switched closed-loop system. Based on the average dwell time (ADT) concept and the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional method, new and less conservative stability conditions are established with a prescribed H∞ performance level in a single-step linear matrix inequality (LMI) formulation. Finally, both a numerical example and a highly maneuverable aircraft technology (HiMAT) vehicle are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the developed strategy.