In this paper, a new adaptive fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme based on a switching strategy is proposed for a class of nonlinear systems with uncertain parameters and actuator failures, for which some healthy actuators are available as backups. By designing a set of monitoring functions (MFs) to supervise the behavior of some variables, it is shown that the failure detection and the switching from a faulty actuator to a healthy one can be performed simultaneously without any knowledge of failure patterns, and the prescribed transient and steady-state performance for the tracking error can be achieved regardless of the switching. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.