Fault-Avoidant Control for Stochastic Fully Actuated Systems with Local Faults

This article presents the problem of fault-avoidant control (FAC) for dynamic systems with local faults (LFs) for the first time. As a more refined model of component faults, local fault enables advanced fault-tolerant control (FTC) techniques with significant potential for ensuring system reliability. Unlike existing FTC approaches based on fault compensation, FAC is dedicated to preventing the state from entering the fault domain to avoid the impact of LFs. Benefiting from the synthesis advantages of the fully actuated system (FAS) methodology, a necessary condition for the avoidability of LFs in stochastic FASs is provided. To address the FAC problem for LFs with high relative order, a novel iterative stochastic control barrier function is developed, which ensures reliable fault avoidance for the state trajectories of high-order stochastic FASs under stochastic disturbances.