Observer‐based fault diagnosis for autonomous systems

Abstract

With the advancement in sensor and communication technology, autonomous systems have been incrementally reshaping the execution of tasks in commercial and military sectors. Since the systems are designed to complete tasks without or with minimal human intervention, fault diagnosis based on sensor data has been crucial to preventing accidents and fatalities. In this paper, fault diagnosis for autonomous systems is designed based on nonlinear adaptive observers, tested in numerical simulations, and implemented in a robotic platform. To this end, we utilize the persistence of excitation conditions on the parametric model of the faults. We derive sufficient conditions for the nonlinear adaptive observer in terms of linear matrix inequality to ensure the convergence of the estimates. Furthermore, we consider one‐sided Lipschitz conditions to obtain less conservative results. The main advantage of using the nonlinear adaptive observer is that the method converges quickly to the actual fault and requires minimum computational effort. However, solving the linear matrix inequality might not be trivial. Numerical simulations based on a single‐link flexible joint robot model and experimental tests in an autonomous quadcopter are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.