Fault-tolerant control system of flexible arm for sensor fault by using reaction force observer

In recent years, control system reliability has received much attention with increase of situations where computer-controlled systems such as robot control systems are used. In order to improve reliability, control systems need to have abilities to detect a fault (fault detection) and to maintain the stability and the control performance (fault tolerance). In this paper, we address the vibration suppression control of a one-link flexible arm robot. Vibration suppression is realized by an additional feedback of a strain gauge sensor attached to the arm besides motor position. However, a sensor fault (e.g., disconnection) may degrade the control performance and make the control system unstable at its worst. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant control system for strain gauge sensor fault. The proposed control system estimates a strain gauge sensor signal based on the reaction force observer and detects the fault by monitoring the estimation error. After fault detection, the proposed control system exchanges the faulty sensor signal for the estimated one and switches to a fault-mode controller so as to maintain the stability and the control performance. We apply the proposed control system to the vibration suppression control system of a one-link flexible arm robot and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed control system by some experiments.