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The presence of faults in dynamic systems causes the potential loss of some of the control objectives. For that reason, a fault-tolerant controller is required to ensure a proper operation, as well as to reduce the risk of accidents. The present work proposes a passive fault-tolerant controller that is based on robust techniques, which are utilized to adjust a proportional-derivative scheme through a linear matrix inequality. In addition, a nonlinear term is included to improve the accuracy of the control task. The proposed methodology is implemented in the control of a two degrees of a freedom robotic helicopter in a simulation environment, where abrupt faults in the actuators are considered. Finally, the proposed scheme is also tested experimentally in the Quanser® 2-DOF Helicopter, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

This paper considers a general approach to fault diagnosis using a generalized Hamiltonian system representation. It can be considered that, in general, nonlinear systems still represent a problem in fault diagnosis because there are results only for a specific class of them. Therefore, fault diagnosis remains a challenging research area despite the maturity of some of the available results. In this work, a type of nonlinear system that admits a generalized Hamiltonian representation is considered; in practice, there are many systems that have this kind of representation. Thereupon, an approach for fault detection and isolation based on the Hamiltonian representation is proposed. First, following the classic approach, the original system is decoupled in different subsystems so that each subsystem is sensitive to one particular fault. Then, taking advantage of the structure, a simple way to design the residuals is presented. Finally, the proposed scheme is validated at the two-degree of freedom (DOF) helicopter of Quanser®, where the presence of faults in sensors and actuators were considered. The results show the efficacy of the proposed scheme.