Actuator-Integrated Fault Estimation and Fault Tolerant Control for Electric Power Steering System of Forklift

Abstract

For the problem of actuator-integrated fault estimation (FE) and fault tolerant control (FTC) for the electric power steering (EPS) system of a forklift, firstly, a dynamic model of a forklift EPS system with actuator faults was established; then, an integrated FE and FTC design was proposed. The nonlinear unknown input observer (NUIO) was proposed to estimate the system states and actuator faults, and an adaptive sliding mode FTC system was constructed based on it. The gain of the observer and controller is obtained by H∞ optimization and one-step linear matrix inequality (LMI) formula operation in order to realize the overall optimal design of an FTC system. Finally, the experimental results show that when actuator failure occurs, the proposed integrated FE and FTC were more accurate than the decentralized design to estimate the system states and the actuator faults. The proposed fault-tolerant controller can more effectively restore the power assist performance of the steering power motor in case of failure and effectively ensure the safety and reliability of the forklift EPS system.