A Fault Tolerant adaptive control for robot manipulators

A Fault Tolerant adaptive control for a robotic manipulator with fault affecting the joint actuators is presented. First, in order to achieve a proper detection and isolation of the fault, an observer based scheme for fault diagnosis is developed. Then, an inverse dynamics robust controller is reconfigured in such a way to include an adaptive term, depending on the isolated fault. The model uncertainties are explicitly taken into account and estimated via an off-line-trained Support Vector Machine. Finally, simulation results are presented in order to prove the effectiveness of the approach.