Observer-Based Fault Diagnosis of Satellite Systems Subject to Time-Varying Thruster Faults

This paper presents a novel fault diagnosis approach in satellite systems for identifying time-varying thruster faults. To overcome the difficulty in identifying time-varying thruster faults by adaptive observers, an iterative learning observer (ILO) is designed to achieve estimation of time-varying faults. The proposed ILO-based fault-identification strategy uses a learning mechanism to perform fault estimation instead of using integrators that are commonly used in classical adaptive observers. The stability of estimation-error dynamics is established and proved. An illustrative example clearly shows that time-varying thruster faults can be accurately identified.