Recently, measures for control system safety against failures in control devices, especially in sensors, have attracted widespread attention. Control theory for designing a compensator such that the stability of the total control system can be maintained against possible device failures has been studied; it is called reliable control. However, because its application to nonlinear control systems has hardly been studied, it has not been put to practical use. The author has presented a new reliable control system with tolerance against sensor failures. Based on the same concept as passive redundancy, decision by majority has been introduced under a situation in which several redundant sensors for the output of a controlled object are in operation simultaneously and independently. From a practical viewpoint, the author extends this approach to nonlinear control systems using exact linearization by state feedback and transformation. This presents a way of overcoming the problems of conventional reliable control. © 1999 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 82(1): 11–22, 1999