Fault Diagnosis and Fault-Tolerant Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

With the increasing demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in both military and civilian applications, critical safety issues need to be specially considered in order to make better and wider use of them. UAVs are usually employed to work in hazardous and complex environments, which may seriously threaten the safety and reliability of UAVs. Therefore, the safety and reliability of UAVs are becoming imperative for development of advanced intelligent control systems. The key challenge now is the lack of fully autonomous and reliable control techniques in face of different operation conditions and sophisticated environments. Further development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control systems is required to be reliable in the presence of system component faults and to be insensitive to model uncertainties and external environmental disturbances. This thesis research aims to design and develop novel control schemes for UAVs with consideration of all the factors that may threaten their safety and reliability. A novel adaptive sliding mode control (SMC) strategy is proposed to accommodate model uncertainties and actuator faults for an unmanned quadrotor helicopter. Compared with the existing adaptive SMC strategies in the literature, the proposed adaptive scheme can tolerate larger actuator faults without stimulating control chattering due to the use of adaptation parameters in both continuous and discontinuous control parts. Furthermore, a fuzzy logic-based boundary layer and a nonlinear disturbance observer are synthesized to further improve the capability of the designed control scheme for tolerating model uncertainties, actuator faults, and unknown external disturbances while preventing overestimation of the adaptive control parameters and suppressing the control chattering effect. Then, a cost-effective fault estimation scheme with a parallel bank of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is proposed to accurately estimate actuator fault magnitude and an active fault-tolerant control (FTC) framework is established for a closed-loop quadrotor helicopter system. Finally, a reconfigurable control allocation approach is combined with adaptive SMC to achieve the capability of tolerating complete actuator failures with application to a modified octorotor helicopter. The significance of this proposed control scheme is that the stability of the closed-loop system is theoretically guaranteed in the presence of both single and simultaneous actuator faults

An Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Sliding Mode Control Allocation Scheme for Multirotor Helicopter Subject to Simultaneous Actuator Faults

This paper proposes a novel adaptive sliding mode based control allocation scheme for accommodating simultaneous actuator faults. The proposed control scheme includes two separate control modules with virtual control part and control allocation part, respectively. As a lowlevel control module, the control allocation/re-allocation scheme is used to distribute/redistribute virtual control signals among the available actuators under fault-free or faulty cases, respectively. In the case of simultaneous actuator faults, the control allocation and re-allocation module may fail to meet the required virtual control signal which will degrade the overall system stability. The proposed online adaptive scheme can seamlessly adjust the control gains for the high-level sliding mode control module and reconfigure the distribution of control signals to eliminate the effect of the virtual control error and maintain stability of the closed-loop system. In addition, with the help of the boundary layer for constructing the adaptation law, the overestimation of control gains is avoided, and the adaptation ceases once the sliding variable is within the boundary layer. A significant feature of this study is that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed theoretically in the presence of simultaneous actuator faults. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is demonstrated by experimental results based on a modified unmanned multirotor helicopter under both single and simultaneous actuator faults conditions with comparison to a conventional sliding mode controller and a linear quadratic regulator scheme

A Hybrid Sensor Based Backstepping Control Approach with its application to Fault-Tolerant Flight Control

Recently, an incremental type sensor based backstepping (SBB) control approach, based on singular perturbation theory and Tikhonov’s theorem, has been proposed. This Lyapunov function based method uses measurements of control variables and less model knowledge, and it is not susceptible to the model uncertainty caused by fault scenarios. In this paper, the SBB method has been implemented on a fixed wing aircraft with its focus on handling structural changes caused by damages. A new hybrid autopilot flight controller has been developed for a Boeing 747-200 aircraft after combining nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI) with SBB control approach. Two benchmarks for fault tolerant flight control (FTFC), named rudder runaway and engine separation, are employed to evaluate the proposed method. The simulation results show that the proposed control approach leads to a zero tracking-error performance in nominal condition and guarantees the stability of the closed-loop system under failures as long as the reference commands are located in the safe flight envelope

Optimal Disturbances Rejection Control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles in Shallow Water Environment

To deal with the disturbances of wave and current in the heading control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), an optimal disturbances rejection control (ODRC) approach for AUVs in shallow water environment is designed to realize this application. Based on the quadratic optimal control theory, the AUVs heading control problem can be expressed as a coupled two-point boundary value (TPBV) problem. Using a recently developed successive approximation approach, the coupled TPBV problem is transformed into solving a decoupled linear state equation sequence and a linear adjoint equation sequence. By iteratively solving the two equation sequences, the approximate ODRC law is obtained. A Luenberger observer is constructed to estimate wave disturbances. Simulation is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented approach

Optimized state feedback regulation of 3DOF helicopter system via extremum seeking

In this paper, an optimized state feedback regulation of a 3 degree of freedom (DOF) helicopter is designed via extremum seeking (ES) technique. Multi-parameter ES is applied to optimize the tracking performance via tuning State Vector Feedback with Integration of the Control Error (SVFBICE). Discrete multivariable version of ES is developed to minimize a cost function that measures the performance of the controller. The cost function is a function of the error between the actual and desired axis positions. The controller parameters are updated online as the optimization takes place. This method significantly decreases the time in obtaining optimal controller parameters. Simulations were conducted for the online optimization under both fixed and varying operating conditions. The results demonstrate the usefulness of using ES for preserving the maximum attainable performance

Comprehensive summary of solid oxide fuel cell control : a state-of-the-art review

Hydrogen energy is a promising renewable resource for the sustainable development of society. As a key member of the fuel cell (FC) family, the solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) has attracted a lot of attention because of characteristics such as having various sources as fuel and high energy conversion efficiency, and being pollution-free. SOFC is a highly coupled, nonlinear, and multivariable complex system, and thus it is very important to design an appropriate control strategy for an SOFC system to ensure its safe, reliable, and efficient operation. This paper undertakes a comprehensive review and detailed summary of the state-of-the-art control approaches of SOFC. These approaches are divided into eight categories of control: proportional integral differential (PID), adaptive (APC), robust, model predictive (MPC), fuzzy logic (FLC), fault-tolerant (FTC), intelligent and observer-based. The SOFC control approaches are carefully evaluated in terms of objective, design, application/scenario, robustness, complexity, and accuracy. Finally, five perspectives are proposed for future research directions

Integrated Optimal and Robust Control of Spacecraft in Proximity Operations

With the rapid growth of space activities and advancement of aerospace science and technology, many autonomous space missions have been proliferating in recent decades. Control of spacecraft in proximity operations is of great importance to accomplish these missions. The research in this dissertation aims to provide a precise, efficient, optimal, and robust controller to ensure successful spacecraft proximity operations. This is a challenging control task since the problem involves highly nonlinear dynamics including translational motion, rotational motion, and flexible structure deformation and vibration. In addition, uncertainties in the system modeling parameters and disturbances make the precise control more difficult. Four control design approaches are integrated to solve this challenging problem. The first approach is to consider the spacecraft rigid body translational and rotational dynamics together with the flexible motion in one unified optimal control framework so that the overall system performance and constraints can be addressed in one optimization process. The second approach is to formulate the robust control objectives into the optimal control cost function and prove the equivalency between the robust stabilization problem and the transformed optimal control problem. The third approach is to employ the è-D technique, a novel optimal control method that is based on a perturbation solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, to solve the nonlinear optimal control problem obtained from the indirect robust control formulation. The resultant optimal control law can be obtained in closedorm, and thus facilitates the onboard implementation. The integration of these three approaches is called the integrated indirect robust control scheme. The fourth approach is to use the inverse optimal adaptive control method combined with the indirect robust control scheme to alleviate the conservativeness of the indirect robust control scheme by using online parameter estimation such that adaptive, robust, and optimal properties can all be achieved. To show the effectiveness of the proposed control approaches, six degree-offreedom spacecraft proximity operation simulation is conducted and demonstrates satisfying performance under various uncertainties and disturbances

Robust model-based fault estimation and fault-tolerant control : towards an integration

To maintain robustly acceptable system performance, fault estimation (FE) is adopted to reconstruct fault signals and a fault-tolerant control (FTC) controller is employed to compensate for the fault effects. The inevitably existing system and estimation uncertainties result in the so-called bi-directional robustness interactions defined in this work between the FE and FTC functions, which gives rise to an important and challenging yet open integrated FE/FTC design problem concerned in this thesis. An example of fault-tolerant wind turbine pitch control is provided as a practical motivation for integrated FE/FTC design.To achieve the integrated FE/FTC design for linear systems, two strategies are proposed. A H∞ optimization based approach is first proposed for linear systems with differentiable matched faults, using augmented state unknown input observer FE and adaptive sliding mode FTC. The integrated design is converted into an observer-based robust control problem solved via a single-step linear matrix inequality formulation.With the purpose of an integrated design with more freedom and also applicable for a range of general fault scenarios, a decoupling approach is further proposed. This approach can estimate and compensate unmatched non-differentiable faults and perturbations by combined adaptive sliding mode augmented state unknown input observer and backstepping FTC controller. The observer structure renders a recovery of the Separation Principle and allows great freedom for the FE/FTC designs.Integrated FE/FTC design strategies are also developed for Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy modelling nonlinear systems, Lipschitz nonlinear systems, and large-scale interconnected systems, based on extensions of the H∞ optimization approach for linear systems.Tutorial examples are used to illustrate the design strategies for each approach. Physical systems, a 3-DOF (degree-of-freedom) helicopter and a 3-machine power system, are used to provide further evaluation of the proposed integrated FE/FTC strategies. Future research on this subject is also outlined