Sensor fault diagnosis and fault tolerant control for the multiple manipulator synchronized control system

In this paper, a fault diagnosis (FD) and fault tolerant control (FTC) scheme is proposed for the leader–follower based multiple manipulator system with sensor fault under network communication topology. The learning observer is designed to obtain the fault information when the time-varying sensor fault occurs in follower manipulators. The synchronization error between the leader manipulator and the follower manipulator is defined based on the graph theory. The distributed multiple manipulator synchronization controller is designed for each follower manipulator which contains the value of fault estimation and RBF neural network based approximator. Correspondingly, the stability analysis of the error system is analyzed by the Lyapunov stability theorem. Finally, a simulation example is given to prove the effectiveness of the algorithm. •The learning observer is designed to obtain the sensor fault information.•The manipulator synchronization FTC scheme is designed for the follower manipulator.•The FTC controller can reduce the impact of the sensor fault.