Multi-agent control of high redundancy actuation

Abstract

The high redundancy actuator (HRA) concept is a novel approach to fault tolerant actuation that uses a high number of small actuation elements, assembled in series and parallel in order to form a single actuator which has intrinsic fault tolerance. Whilst this structure affords resilience under passive control methods alone, active control approaches are likely to provide higher levels of performance. A multiple-model control scheme for an HRA applied through the framework of multi-agent control is presented here. The application of this approach to a 10×10 HRA is discussed and consideration of reconfiguration delays and fault detection errors are made. The example shows that multi-agent control can provide tangible performance improvements and increase fault tolerance in comparison to a passive fault tolerant approach. Reconfiguration delays are shown to be tolerable, and a strategy for handling false fault detections is detailed. © 2014 Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.