Davies, Jessica and Dixon, Roger and Goodall, Roger M. and Steffen, Thomas (2014) Multi-agent control of high redundancy actuation. International Journal of Automation and Computing, 11 (1). pp. 1-9. ISSN 1751-8520
Full text not available from this repository.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.