In recent years there has been increased interest in the use of active approaches for fault detection. In one of these approaches an auxiliary signal is designed such that over a short period it will reveal a fault not otherwise detectable and do so with as little perturbation of system performance as possible. This method is robust in the sense of guaranteeing the detection of the fault for a whole set of bounded uncertainties. Feedback plays an important role in control but its role in active fault detection based on auxiliary signals has not been explored. yet. This paper begins that investigation. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.