End-to-End Deep Fault Tolerant Control
This addresses fault-tolerant control for nonlinear mechatronic systems, offering a novel deep learning approach that is incremental in replacing model-based methods.
The paper tackled sensor faults in mechatronic systems by proposing an end-to-end deep learning method using a recurrent neural network to replace traditional fault detection and controller design, applied to a spherical inverted pendulum with simulation and experimental results showing it can handle abrupt faults in position/velocity sensors.
PUBLISHED ON IEEE/ASME TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS, DOI: 10.1109/TMECH.2021.3100150. Ideally, accurate sensor measurements are needed to achieve a good performance in the closed-loop control of mechatronic systems. As a consequence, sensor faults will prevent the system from working correctly, unless a fault-tolerant control (FTC) architecture is adopted. As model-based FTC algorithms for nonlinear systems are often challenging to design, this paper focuses on a new method for FTC in the presence of sensor faults, based on deep learning. The considered approach replaces the phases of fault detection and isolation and controller design with a single recurrent neural network, which has the value of past sensor measurements in a given time window as input, and the current values of the control variables as output. This end-to-end deep FTC method is applied to a mechatronic system composed of a spherical inverted pendulum, whose configuration is changed via reaction wheels, in turn actuated by electric motors. The simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method can handle abrupt faults occurring in link position/velocity sensors. The provided supplementary material includes a video of real-world experiments and the software source code.