Fault-tolerant flight control design for effective and reliable aircraft systems

TLDR: In this article, a fault-tolerant control (FTC) approach is proposed to simultaneously compensate for actuator faults, model mismatch and parameter variations in aircraft systems, which successfully combines the properties of active and passive FTCs to accommodate faults while retaining acceptable system performance.

Abstract: Effectiveness in flight control is achieved by maintaining specified performance despite the presence of faults and reliability implies taking the necessary measures to correct the fault before it leads to substantial performance deterioration and instability. In order to achieve both effectiveness and reliability, in this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant control (FTC) approach that is able to simultaneously compensate for actuator faults, model mismatch and parameter variations in aircraft systems. The proposed control design successfully combines the properties of active and passive FTCs to accommodate faults while retaining acceptable system performance. A passive baseline controller is designed using sliding mode theory and an active controller is designed using a model reference adaptive approach. The proposed control paradigm retains system performance under fault free conditions and triggers corrective measures only when necessary, hence ensuring flight effectiveness and enhancing system’s reliab...