Stability and reliability are the most important indicators of drive systems. In this article, a robust nonlinear control method is advanced for dual three-phase permanent-magnet synchronous machine (dual-PMSM) drives, based on the synergetic control theory. This control is implemented by a new synergetic controller (SGC) integrating with an extended sliding mode observer (ESMO), and an optimization method is applied to obtain the optimal parameters of the SGC. This control scheme not only improves the dynamic performance even with operating parameters change, but also can diagnose the speed sensor fault and realize the fault tolerant control (FTC). The proposed control method is compared with the PI control, the sliding mode control (SMC) and the predictive control, as well as the simulation and experimental results confirm the superior dynamic performance and the effectiveness on the speed sensor fault diagnosis (FD) and FTC.

Reliability is pivotal significance for switched reluctance machine drives (SRD) applied to safety essential transportation and industrial fields. An inter-turn shorted-circuit fault (ISCF) could incite the machine to operate in unbalanced status, resulting in the noise increases. In the event such a fault remains untreated, the fault will further destroy the rest of the normal phases, even leading to a tragic incident for the entire drive application. To improve the reliability of SRD, an efficient on-line fault diagnosis method for ISCF should be proposed. This paper is focused on employing the strong track filter (STF) to achieve real-time phase resistance differences between before and after ISCF, which are used as features to diagnose the fault occurrence and the fault phase. Furthermore, a classification namely as linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is selected to estimate fault severity. Finally, simulation and experiments correspond to various running statuses are executed and their results can verify that the diagnosis method has accuracy and robustness.

Ensemble learning systems (ELS) have been widely utilized for human activity recognition (HAR) with multiple homogeneous or heterogeneous sensors. However, traditional ensemble approaches for HAR cannot always work well due to insufficient accuracy and diversity of base classifiers, the absence of ensemble pruning, as well as the inefficiency of the fusion strategy. To overcome these problems, this paper proposes a novel selective ensemble approach with group decision-making (GDM) for decision-level fusion in HAR. As a result, the fusion process in the ELS is transformed into an abstract process that includes individual experts (base classifiers) making decisions with the GDM fusion strategy. Firstly, a set of diverse local base classifiers are constructed through the corresponding mechanism of the base classifier and the sensor. Secondly, the pruning methods and the number of selected base classifiers for the fusion phase are determined by considering the diversity among base classifiers and the accuracy of candidate classifiers. Two ensemble pruning methods are utilized: mixed diversity measure and complementarity measure. Thirdly, component decision information from the selected base classifiers is combined by using the GDM fusion strategy and the recognition results of the HAR approach can be obtained. Experimental results on two public activity recognition datasets (The OPPORTUNITY dataset; Daily and Sports Activity Dataset (DSAD)) suggest that the proposed GDM-based approach outperforms the well-known fusion techniques and other state-of-the-art approaches in the literature.

For the detection of incipient interturn short-circuit (IITSC) faults of machines without shutting them down, there are still shortcomings of insufficient incipient fault features and a high false alarm rate. This is especially the case for dual three-phase permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) with complex winding structures, and this kind of incipient fault detection is more complicated. To solve this detection difficulty, an IITSC detection method for dual three-phase PMSMs is proposed based on a modified deep autoencoder (MDAE). This autoencoder (AE) adopts an improved distribution metric combined with the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and the maximum covariance discrepancy (MCD) to extract the fault feature from the common features, which can improve the feature difference between the normal state and the incipient fault state. Then, the permutation entropy of the extracted features is calculated to detect the IITSC faults. The results illustrate that this method can not only detect IITSC faults online effectively and robustly, but also reduce the false alarm rate of the fault detection for dual three-phase PMSMs.