Given a number of possibly concurrent faults (and disturbances) that may affect a nonlinear dynamic system, it may not be possible to solve the standard fault detection and isolation (FDI) problem, i.e., to detect and isolate each single fault from all other, possibly concurrent faults and disturbances, due to the violation of the available necessary conditions of geometric nature. Motivated by a robotic application where this negative situation structurally occurs, we propose some relaxed formulations of the FDI problem and show how necessary and sufficient conditions for their solution can be derived from those available for standard FDI. The design of a hybrid residual generator follows directly from the fulfillment of the corresponding solvability conditions. In the considered nonlinear case study, a robotic system affected by possible actuator and/or force sensor faults, we detail the application of these results and present experimental tests for validation. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.