Adaptive Compensation for Infinite Number of Actuator Faults and Time-Varying Delay of a Flexible Manipulator System

This article addresses a novel adaptive compensation strategy for a flexible manipulator in the presence of unmodeled system dynamics and an infinite number of time-varying actuator faults. Differing from the existing results, the unmodeled system dynamics are represented by a nonlinear time-varying delay function, which is tackled with the aid of neural network technique and Lyapunov-Krasovskii function. By introducing the projection technique and a piecewise Lyapunov function, a fault-tolerant control method is proposed, the uniformly ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop system is ensured, and the number of actuator faults is allowed to be infinite. Simulation and physical experiment results show that the manipulator can track the desired angle and the vibration can be suppressed effectively under the proposed scheme for the system with uncertainties and actuator faults.