Abstract
This paper studies the
Introduction
When sketching the works on model-based fault diagnosis (including fault detection, fault isolation, and fault estimation) from 1970s of the last century, different kinds of optimization techniques for robust control have been widely used in this area, which lead to the so-called robust fault diagnosis, for example, see previous works1–6 and the references therein. The core idea behind model-based robust fault diagnosis is to construct a residual signal that prominently indicates whether a fault occurs in the system, but simultaneously reduces the effects from modeling uncertainties and exogenous disturbances/unknown inputs to this signal. Roughly speaking, by distinguishing the characteristics of the exogenous disturbance, existing contributions can be categorized into two types: that is,
Until now, by using the
Nonlinearity is also one of the inherent characteristics for practical systems, and therefore, researchers have devoted much to fault diagnosis for nonlinear systems with bounded inputs. In this literature, with the aid of mature results on fault diagnosis for LTI systems, there are lots of results on systems with nonlinear perturbations, where these systems can be viewed as special LTI systems with nonlinear disturbances.4,12–14 In this manner, designer can extend results for LTI systems to those systems using offline
In this study, we aim to propose a novel
A non-conservatism framework for estimating the fault is addressed after linearizing the nonlinear system.
A sufficient and necessary condition for the existence of the fault estimator is established.
A recursive algorithm for calculating the gain matrix of the estimator is given.
Notations
Throughout this study,
Problem formulation
Consider the following time-variant nonlinear systems
where
For system (1), our main objective of this study is to find
where
here,
To achieve our goal, a dynamic filter which plays the role of the estimator is needed. To proceed, we first expand
where
The matrix
Define
and
Equation (3) can be rewritten as
with
Thus, the original time-variant nonlinear system (1) is transformed into a linear form by taking the linearization error into account, where this error refers to the high-order terms of the Taylor series expansion and is modeled by norm-bounded uncertain matrix.
Traditionally speaking, for the purpose of designing an appropriate
Observing the fact that the converted system includes uncertain matrices
with
For system (9), let
and define the following alternative performance function
Then, we get the following lemma.
Lemma 1
Given any
Proof
From system (10), we can get
Thus, through equation (4), we can deduce equation (11) holds. □
Denote
Corollary 1
Given any
From Lemma 1 and Corollary 1, we know that
Problem 1
To ensure
To choose a suitable
In virtue of Hassibi et al.
27
and Zhao et al.,
29
Problem 1 can be transformed into a linear estimation problem in indefinite inner product space, namely, Krein space. In other words, we need to build a model in this space with regard to system (9); find the minimum of
Main results
To continue, we preliminarily introduce the following model through defining a fictitious output
where
Remember that
where
Thus, by using the following notations
where
Let
and denote
here,
Let
Since
In terms of systems (12)–(18) and according to Hassibi et al. 27 and Zhao et al., 29 we can introduce the following Krein space stochastic system to settle Problem 1
where
with
Based on systems (19) and (20), we can define some related variables below
with
and
where
Let
and define
From the analysis above and according to Hassibi et al., 27 we can draw the following result, which is summarized as Corollary 2.
Corollary 2
For system (9) and a given perturbation attenuation ratio
where
here,
Based on Corollary 2, we are ready to choose an appropriate function of the measurement set
Theorem 1
For system (9) and a given perturbation attenuation ratio
In such a case, one choice of
where
Proof
Let
Thus,
where
Partition the measurement variable
where
Note that
and let
Denote
Thus, by applying the Schur factorization in systems (25)–(27), and observing the fact that
we then have the following relationship from systems (28)–(30)
where
Recalling the necessary and sufficient condition that ensures the existence of the fault estimator, that is
and applying Corollary 2, a natural choice that guarantees
which is system (26). This completes the proof. □
After choosing a suitable
Corollary 3
The state variable of the estimator
where
with
Proof
Since
where
Thus, systems (35) and (36) lead to the form of the filter in system (32) with its gain matrix in system (33).
Note that the variables
and
Hence, by using the orthogonal property between
Remarks
Before ending the main body of this study, we would like to give some remarks:
In view of Theorem 1 and Corollary 3, our proposed algorithm provides a generalized form on some kinds of discrete time-variant systems, such as nonlinear system with differentiable condition, linear nominal systems, and uncertain linear system. It should be pointed out that, although one can neglect the linearization errors when using Taylor series expansions for the considered nonlinear system, or directly augment these errors into unknown input, some design conservatism may be introduced by artificially ignoring some prior information on the system. In contrast, our algorithm does not produce the conservatism by taking these errors in the design procedure. 30
In this study, the considered nonlinearity only appears in the state equation (1). We would like to mention that, our result can also be extended to the cases when the same category of the nonlinearity occurs in the measurement equation by choosing appropriate auxiliary variables and the corresponding dynamic model in Krein space.
Due to the recursive property of the proposed algorithm, the fault signal can be estimated in real time. For nonlinear systems subject to stochastic modeling uncertainties, unreliable communication links, or with other kinds of random properties, much effort should be paid on online fault detection, fault estimation, and fault isolation, which leads to our future work.
An illustrative example
In recent years, indoor robot localization has attracted wide attention. In order to acquire the accurate position information, some state estimators such as Kalman filter and finite impulse response filter are used as the data fusion filter to improve the accuracy.
31
The state equation used by these filters at time index
here,
where
Based on the above state-space models, that is, systems (37) and (38), consider the circumstance that when process fault and/or sensor fault occurs, the simulation of fault estimation for indoor robot localization systems is performed. During the simulation, the sampling time
and the related matrices in system (1) are assumed to be as follows
Let

Fault signal and its estimation.
Conclusion
In this paper, the fault estimation problem for a class of time-variant nonlinear systems has been studied in the
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant numbers 61973135, 91948201, 61773242, and 61673245; the Shandong Provincial Key R&D Program, China, under grant no. 2018GGX104025; and the project ZR2017QF007 supported by Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation.
