1.2 Robust Observer-Based Fault Diagnosis: An Overview 5
problem of BJFDF was later investigated in [43] using a spectral approach and in
[44] using eigenstructure assignment. Some methods to improve the robustness
of BJFDF have been proposed in [45–47].
2. Unknown-input observer (UIO)-based fault diagnosis. The design of
observers for systems subject to unknown-inputs has attracted considerable atten-
tion in the past and different UIOs have been developed. For example, in [48]
full-order linear UIOs were designed while in [49] reduced-order linear UIOs
were designed; Nonlinear UIOs were designed for bilinear systems in [50] and
for Lipschitz nonlinear systems in [51, 52].
If uncertainties are treated as unknown-inputs, UIOs can be readily used for fault
diagnosis. In [53–55], fault diagnosis schemes based on UIO were proposed for
linear systems with uncertainties. For special classes of nonlinear systems such
as bilinear systems and Lipschitz nonlinear systems, UIO-based fault diagnosis
were designed in [56, 57]. Linear UIO was extended to a more general class of
nonlinear systems using a nonlinear state transformation, and was applied to fault
diagnosis for uncertain nonlinear systems in [58]. It is worth noting that most
existing UIO-based schemes assume that the fault distribution matrix i s known,
which is often not the case, and many of them are only devoted to FD or single FI.
3. Adaptive observer (AO)-based fault diagnosis. The AO has the ability that
they can estimate not only system states, but also the slowly varying unknown
parameters of the observed systems. In [59–61], systems are assumed to be known
and faults can be properly parameterized. In [62, 63], AO was designed for systems
with unknown parameters. The main disadvantage of AO-based fault diagnosis
methods is that the they are normally only suitable for the constant fault case.
However, faults are often time-varying and even fast time-varying sometimes.
4. Sliding-mode observer (SMO)-based fault diagnosis. Due to the inherent
robustness of sliding-mode algorithms to unknown modeling uncertainties and
disturbances, the fault diagnosis methods based on SMOs have been widely stud-
ied in recent years. Considerable success has been achieved in many areas; for
example, see [8, 39, 64–70].
Early work on applying the SMO for fault diagnosis was shown in [71] where an
SMO is designed with the assumption that the states of the system are available. In
[66, 67], the authors attempted t o design an SMO for systems with uncertainties.
When a fault occurs, the sliding motion will be destroyed and the residual will
deviate from zero. On the other hand, the SMO proposed in [8], which is similar
to that of [72], can maintain the sliding mode even after the presence of faults by
selecting an appropriate gain. Therefore, the constant actuator faults and sensor
faults can be reconstructed by the so-called equivalent output injection concept
under certain conditions. This result was extended to a more general case in [73]
where the derivative of the sensor fault is nonzero. However, the requirement
of a complicated coordinate transformation and that the system is accurately
known and limits its application. The assumption of open-loop stability in [73]
was later relaxed in [68] to achieve robust sensor-fault estimation using a linear
matrix inequality (LMI) formulation. In [74
], a nonlinear diffeomorphism was
introduced to explore the system structure and the sensor fault was transformed