Fault Detection and Fault-Tolerant Control of a Civil Aircraft Using a Sliding-Mode-Based Scheme

Abstract

Abstract-This paper presents a sliding mode approach for fault tolerant control of a civil aircraft, where both actuator and sensor faults are considered. For actuator faults, a controller is designed around a state-feedback sliding mode scheme where the gain of the nonlinear unit vector term is allowed to adaptively increase at the onset of a fault. Unexpected deviation of the switching variables from their nominal condition triggers the adaptation mechanism. The controller proposed here is relatively simple and yet is shown to work across the entire 'up and away' flight envelope. For sensor faults, the application of a robust method for fault reconstruction using a sliding mode observer is considered. The novelty lies in the application of the sensor fault reconstruction scheme to correct the corrupted measured signals before they are used by the controller and therefore the controller does not need to be reconfigured.

Sliding mode methods for fault detection and fault tolerant control with application to aerospace systems

“…It is argued by Alwi and Edwards (2008a;2008b) that a broad class of actuator faults can be accommodated by an appropriate scheme which monitors quantitatively the extent to which a sliding motion (in a control context) is being maintained and then triggers an adaptive mechanism if there is deterioration in performance. The controller is based around a state- feedback sliding mode scheme and the gain associated with the nonlinear term is allowed to adaptively increase when the onset of a fault is detected.…”

“…Although sliding mode controllers (e.g., Alwi and Edwards, 2008a) cope easily with faults, they are not able to directly deal with failures, i.e., the total loss of an actuator. In order to overcome this, the integration of a sliding mode scheme with a control allocation framework has been considered (Alwi and Edwards, 2008b), where the effectiveness level of the actuators is used to redistribute the control signals to the 'healthier' actuators when a fault occurs.…”

“…A key aspect of the design is to establish the matrix Q from (42). For details, see the work of Alwi and Edwards (2008a). Principal component Sliding mode methods for fault detection and fault tolerant control.…”

Adaptive Neural Fault-Tolerant Control of a 3-DOF Model Helicopter System

“…In [39], a model predictive control-based nonlinear fault tolerant control was developed for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles. Fault detection and fault-tolerant control were studied for civil aircraft using a siding-mode-based scheme in [40]. With the 3-DOF model helicopter being an ideal test platform, it is natural to develop the fault tolerant control scheme for the helicopter, especially when the helicopter is subject to unknown external disturbances that will further affect the control performance.…”

Robust fault tolerant tracking controller design for a VTOL aircraft

“…In terms of flight control applications, the survey paper of [3] describes the latest development in this subarea. The paper [4 ], represents some of the most important recent research in the field of flight fault tolerant control using sliding-mode techniques. In [ 5 ] , the problem of the FT control of aircraft in the presence of both unknown input disturbance and sensor failure is presented.…”