A fully actuated system approach to event-triggered fault-tolerant control of a class of interconnected nonlinear systems

This paper presents a novel event-triggered fault-tolerant control (FTC) strategy for interconnected nonlinear systems (INSs) using the fully actuated system (FAS) approach. The FAS model of INSs is derived through recursive transformations, enabling a more flexible and efficient controller design procedure compared to traditional backstepping methods. The proposed method explicitly accounts for modeling uncertainties, ensuring robustness without relying on neural networks or requiring exact knowledge of uncertainties. A switching-threshold mechanism, which combines fixed and relative thresholds, is introduced to balance communication overhead and system performance. The uniform ultimate boundedness of the tracking error under system faults is rigorously established. Moreover, the proposed framework is experimentally validated on a self-developed platform with two inverted pendulum systems connected via a spring, demonstrating its practical applicability and effectiveness.