Piloted Simulator Evaluation Results of New Fault-Tolerant Flight Control Algorithm

Abstract

A high fidelity aircraft simulation model, reconstructed using the Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR) of the 1992 Amsterdam Bijlmermeer aircraft accident (Flight 1862), has been used to evaluate a new Fault-Tolerant Flight Control Algorithm in an online piloted evaluation. This paper focuses on the piloted simulator evaluation results. Reconfiguring control is implemented by making use of Adaptive Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (ANDI) for manual fly by wire control. After discussing the modular adaptive controller setup, the experiment is described for a piloted simulator evaluation of this innovative reconfigurable control algorithm applied to a damaged civil transport aircraft. The evaluation scenario, measurements and experimental design, as well as the real-time implementation are described. Finally, reconfiguration test results are shown for damaged aircraft models including component as well as structural failures. The evaluation shows that the FTFC algorithm is able to restore conventional control strategies after the aircraft configuration has changed dramatically due to these severe failures. The algorithm supports the pilot after a failure by lowering workload and allowing a safe return to the airport. For most failures, the handling qualities are shown to degrade less with a failure than the baseline classical control system does.

Fault-Tolerant Attitude Control for Spacecraft Under Loss of Actuator Effectiveness

“…A T PRESENT, a large number of engineers have assorted to faulttolerant control (FTC) to enhance the system reliability and to guarantee the control performance (see, e.g., [1][2][3][4] and references therein), and several investigations on the application of FTC to spacecraft attitude maneuvers have also been considered. For instance, based on the dynamics inversion and time-delay control, a passive fault-tolerant controller was developed in [5] to achieve attitude tracking of a rigid satellite.…”

Intelligent Flight Control Systems Evaluation for Loss-of-Control Recovery and Prevention

“…The reconfigured aircraft (FBW-ANDI) was able to improve the handling qualities back toward the upper level 1 region. This was substantiated by the measured pilot control activities, representative of workload, indicating no sustained pilot compensation after control reconfiguration [26].…”

“…The trends of the pilot ratings for the ANDI reconfigurable control algorithm show that, especially for the El Al Flight 1862 engine separation scenario, conventional flight control was restored up to acceptable handling qualities levels (upper level 1) following a failure. In these conditions, no significant task performance degradations occurred as compared to the unfailed flyby-wire aircraft, whereas the physical and mental workloads were reduced as indicated by an analysis of the aggregated control forces and pilot comments [26]. After incurring significant damage due to the separation of the right-wing engines, the pilot ratings for the conventional aircraft with a classical control system clearly show that, in all conditions, above the minimum control speed, level 2 (ratings of 4-6) handling qualities existed.…”

Trajectory planning of unmanned aerial vehicle based on the improved biogeography-based optimization algorithm

“…The elements of the reference attitude vector E r = u r , u r , c r ð Þ T related to the inertial coordinate frame are follows: u r = arcsin u=V T ð Þ, u r = arcsin w=V T ð Þ, and c r = arcsin v=V T ð Þ. To verify the RBFNN's performance of estimating the external disturbance, the contrasted controllers without RBFNN of equations (27) and (34) are set as:…”