Adaptive optimal sliding-mode fault-tolerant control for nonlinear systems with disturbances and estimation errors

This paper gives a fault-tolerant control scheme concerning with the optimal and near-optimal system performance for a class of nonlinear systems with time-varying actuator faults, time-varying disturbances, and identification errors of the neural network-based identifier. In this paper, the adaptive dynamic programming method is directly used to design the optimal sliding surface, so that the designer can design the target dynamics of the sliding mode in advance. In addition, the barrier function-based sliding-mode control is used to cope with the bounded but boundary-unknown estimation errors of the identifier, and the method ensures that the sliding-mode variable converges to the designer's predefined neighborhood of zero in finite time and the control gain is not overestimated. Specifically, first, by adaptive dynamic programming, near-optimal sliding surface is designed in the sense of the quadratic optimal criterion. Second, a neural network identifier is designed to model the lumped uncertainties including actuator faults and disturbances. Third, a barrier function-based adaptive sliding-mode control is used to cope with the identification errors of the neural network identifier and has no control gain overestimation, which can guarantee to confine the sliding variable to a predefined vicinity of the proposed sliding surface. For this system with faults and disturbances, it is shown that near-optimal property is achieved by this scheme, the chattering phenomenon is effectively suppressed, and the reconstruction error of the neural network identifier with unknown boundary is effectively handled by the adaptive sliding-mode control based on the barrier function. The proof of stability is given by Lyapunov's direct method and the effectiveness of this control scheme is verified by applying it to the spacecraft attitude system.