A survey on fractional order control techniques for unmanned aerial and ground vehicles

In recent years, numerous applications of science and engineering for modeling and control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) systems based on fractional calculus have been realized. The extra fractional order derivative terms allow to optimizing the performance of the systems. The review presented in this paper focuses on the control problems of the UAVs and UGVs that have been addressed by the fractional order techniques over the last decade

Fault tolerant control for nonlinear aircraft based on feedback linearization

The thesis concerns the fault tolerant flight control (FTFC) problem for nonlinear aircraft by making use of analytical redundancy. Considering initially fault-free flight, the feedback linearization theory plays an important role to provide a baseline control approach for de-coupling and stabilizing a non-linear statically unstable aircraft system. Then several reconfigurable control strategies are studied to provide further robust control performance:- A neural network (NN)-based adaption mechanism is used to develop reconfigurable FTFC performance through the combination of a concurrent updated learninglaw. - The combined feedback linearization and NN adaptor FTFC system is further improved through the use of a sliding mode control (SMC) strategy to enhance the convergence of the NN learning adaptor. - An approach to simultaneous estimation of both state and fault signals is incorporated within an active FTFC system.The faults acting independently on the three primary actuators of the nonlinear aircraft are compensated in the control system.The theoretical ideas developed in the thesis have been applied to the nonlinear Machan Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system. The simulation results obtained from a tracking control system demonstrate the improved fault tolerant performance for all the presented control schemes, validated under various faults and disturbance scenarios.A Boeing 747 nonlinear benchmark model, developed within the framework of the GARTEUR FM-AG 16 project “fault tolerant flight control systems”,is used for the purpose of further simulation study and testing of the FTFC scheme developed by making the combined use of concurrent learning NN and SMC theory. The simulation results under the given fault scenario show a promising reconfiguration performance

Active Fault Tolerant Control of MuPAL-a Using Sliding Modes

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this recordThis paper proposes a simple adaptive sliding mode observer to estimate the effectiveness level of actuators and uses this information as part of an active fault tolerant controller. These observers create an FDI scheme at a 'local' level and the effectiveness estimates are used to drive the online control allocation component in the overall scheme. The approach has been tested on a model of JAXA's MuPAL-a experimental aircraft. The nonlinear simulation results, in fault free and faulty situations, show the efficacy of the scheme. Furthermore, the proposed sliding mode observer has been tested offline using previously collected MuPAL-a flight data and good results are achieved.European Union Horizon 2020Japan New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organizatio

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

On-line estimation approaches to fault-tolerant control of uncertain systems

This thesis is concerned with fault estimation in Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) and as such involves the joint problem of on-line estimation within an adaptive control system. The faults that are considered are significant uncertainties affecting the control variables of the process and their estimates are used in an adaptive control compensation mechanism. The approach taken involves the active FTC, as the faults can be considered as uncertainties affecting the control system. The engineering (application domain) challenges that are addressed are: (1) On-line model-based fault estimation and compensation as an FTC problem, for systems with large but bounded fault magnitudes and for which the faults can be considered as a special form of dynamic uncertainty. (2) Fault-tolerance in the distributed control of uncertain inter-connected systems The thesis also describes how challenge (1) can be used in the distributed control problem of challenge (2). The basic principle adopted throughout the work is that the controller has two components, one involving the nominal control action and the second acting as an adaptive compensation for significant uncertainties and fault effects. The fault effects are a form of uncertainty which is considered too large for the application of passive FTC methods. The thesis considers several approaches to robust control and estimation: augmented state observer (ASO); sliding mode control (SMC); sliding mode fault estimation via Sliding Mode Observer (SMO); linear parameter-varying (LPV) control; two-level distributed control with learning coordination

Fault tolerant longitudinal aircraft control using non-linear integral sliding mode

Copyright © 2014 Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)This study proposes a novel non-linear fault tolerant scheme for longitudinal control of an aircraft system, comprising an integral sliding mode control allocation scheme and a backstepping structure. In fault free conditions, the closed loop system is governed by the backstepping controller and the integral sliding mode control allocation scheme only influences the performance if faults/failures occur in the primary control surfaces. In this situation, the allocation scheme redistributes the control signals to the secondary control surfaces and the scheme is able to tolerate total failures in the primary actuator. A backstepping scheme taken from the existing literature is designed for flight path angle tracking (based on the non-linear equations of motion) and this is used as the underlying baseline controller in nominal conditions. The efficacy of the scheme is demonstrated using a high-fidelity aircraft benchmark model. Excellent results are obtained in the presence of plant/model uncertainty in both fault free and faulty conditions

Observer-based robust fault estimation for fault-tolerant control

A control system is fault-tolerant if it possesses the capability of optimizing the system stability and admissible performance subject to bounded faults, complexity and modeling uncertainty. Based on this definition this thesis is concerned with the theoretical developments of the combination of robust fault estimation (FE) and robust active fault tolerant control (AFTC) for systems with both faults and uncertainties.This thesis develops robust strategies for AFTC involving a joint problem of on-line robust FE and robust adaptive control. The disturbances and modeling uncertainty affect the FE and FTC performance. Hence, the proposed robust observer-based fault estimator schemes are combined with several control methods to achieve the desired system performance and robust active fault tolerance. The controller approaches involve concepts of output feedback control, adaptive control, robust observer-based state feedback control. A new robust FE method has been developed initially to take into account the joint effect of both fault and disturbance signals, thereby rejecting the disturbances and enhancing the accuracy of the fault estimation. This is then extended to encompass the robustness with respect to modeling uncertainty.As an extension to the robust FE and FTC scheme a further development is made for direct application to smooth non-linear systems via the use of linear parameter-varying systems (LPV) modeling.The main contributions of the research are thus:- The development of a robust observer-based FE method and integration design for the FE and AFTC systems with the bounded time derivative fault magnitudes, providing the solution based on linear matrix inequality (LMI) methodology. A stability proof for the integrated design of the robust FE within the FTC system.- An improvement is given to the proposed robust observer-based FE method and integrated design for FE and AFTC systems under the existence of different disturbance structures.- New guidance for the choice of learning rate of the robust FE algorithm.- Some improvement compared with the recent literature by considering the FTC problem in a more general way, for example by using LPV modeling

Deep Learning-Based, Passive Fault Tolerant Control Facilitated by a Taxonomy of Cyber-Attack Effects

In the interest of improving the resilience of cyber-physical control systems to better operate in the presence of various cyber-attacks and/or faults, this dissertation presents a novel controller design based on deep-learning networks. This research lays out a controller design that does not rely on fault or cyber-attack detection. Being passive, the controller’s routine operating process is to take in data from the various components of the physical system, holistically assess the state of the physical system using deep-learning networks and decide the subsequent round of commands from the controller. This use of deep-learning methods in passive fault tolerant control (FTC) is unique in the research literature. The proposed controller is applied to both linear and nonlinear systems. Additionally, the application and testing are accomplished with both actuators and sensors being affected by attacks and /or faults

A new fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control method for mechanical and aeronautical systems with neural estimators

A new method of fault detection and fault tolerant control is proposed in this paper for mechanical systems and aeronautical systems. The faults to be estimated and diagnosed are malfunctions occurred within the control loops of the systems, rather than some static faults, such as gearbox fault, component cracks, etc. In the proposed method two neural networks are used as on-line estimators, the fault will be accurately estimated when the estimators are adapted on-line with the post fault dynamic information. Furthermore, the estimated value of faults are used to compensate for the impact of the faults, so that the stability and performance of the system with the faults are maintained until the faulty components to be repaired. The sliding mode control is used to maintain system stability under the post fault dynamics. The control law and the neural network learning algorithms are derived using the Lyapunov method, so that the neural estimators are guaranteed to converge to the fault to be diagnosed, while the entire closed-loop system stability is guaranteed with all variables bounded. The main contribution of this paper to the knowledge in this field is that the proposed method cannot only diagnose and tolerant with constant fault, also diagnose and tolerant with the time-varying faults. This is very important because most faults occurred in industrial systems are time-varying in nature. A simulation example is used to demonstrate the design procedure and the effectiveness of the method. The simulation results are compared with two existing methods that can cope with constant faults only, and the superiority is demonstrated