Practical Prescribed-Time Fault-Tolerant Tracking Control for Uncertain Nonlinear Systems via an Immediate Actuator Switching Strategy

This article addresses the practical prescribed-time fault-tolerant tracking control (PFTC) problem for a class of nonlinear systems characterized by uncertain control gains and external disturbances. A novel prescribed-time regulator (PTR) is proposed to construct the controller, thereby achieving the tracking control objective with arbitrary accuracy within the prescribed tracking time. The phenomenon of complete actuator faults is also considered, and a fault-tolerant control strategy with immediate actuator switching is designed to mitigate their impact. Furthermore, a self-regulating control gain based on an error-feedback mechanism is introduced to restrain the control input while improving the overall control performance. To overcome the issue of “complexity explosion” arising from the derivation of virtual controllers, a class of nonlinear filters is designed to estimate the values of the virtual controllers. The PFTC strategy proposed in this article ensures the following: 1) all the signals in the closed-loop system remain bounded; 2) the tracking error is practical prescribed-time tracking stable; and 3) after detection of actuator faults, the tracking error reconverges to the desired range within the prescribed recovery time. Lastly, a simulation example is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.