Reliable control of nonlinear systems via variable structure scheme

Abstract

This study proposes a class of reliable Variable Structure Control (VSC) laws, which are shown to be able to tolerate the outage of actuators within a prespecified subset of actuators. The gain margins of guaranteeing system stability are estimated, which depend on control parameters and are larger than those obtained by LQR reliable design (Veillette, 1995 and Liang et. al., 2000). In addition, this approach does not need to solve the Hamilton-Jacobi equation or inequality, which is known difficult to solve and is an essential part in the reliable LQR and H-infinity designs. As a matter of fact, this approach can also relax the computational load for solving the Hamilton-Jacobi inequality.