397 research outputs found

    Optimal fault-tolerant flight control for aircraft with actuation impairments

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    Current trends towards greater complexity and automation are leaving modern technological systems increasingly vulnerable to faults. Without proper action, a minor error may lead to devastating consequences. In flight control, where the controllability and dynamic stability of the aircraft primarily rely on the control surfaces and engine thrust, faults in these effectors result in a higher extent of risk for these aspects. Moreover, the operation of automatic flight control would be suddenly disturbed. To address this problem, different methodologies of designing optimal flight controllers are presented in this thesis. For multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the feedback optimal control is a prominent technique that solves a multi-objective cost function, which includes, for instance, tracking requirements and control energy minimisation. The first proposed method is based on a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) control law augmented with a fault-compensation scheme. This fault-tolerant system handles the situation in an adaptive way by solving the optimisation cost function and considering fault information, while assuming an effective fault detection system is available. The developed scheme was tested in a six-degrees-of-freedom nonlinear environment to validate the linear-based controller. Results showed that this fault tolerant control (FTC) strategy managed to handle high magnitudes of the actuator’s loss of effciency faults. Although the rise time of aircraft response became slower, overshoot and settling errors were minimised, and the stability of the aircraft was maintained. Another FTC approach has been developed utilising the features of controller robustness against the system parametric uncertainties, without the need for reconfiguration or adaptation. Two types of control laws were established under this scheme, the H∞ and µ-synthesis controllers. Both were tested in a nonlinear environment for three points in the flight envelope: ascending, cruising, and descending. The H∞ controller maintained the requirements in the intact case; while in fault, it yielded non-robust high-frequency control surface deflections. The µ-synthesis, on the other hand, managed to handle the constraints of the system and accommodate faults reaching 30% loss of effciency in actuation. The final approach is based on the control allocation technique. It considers the tracking requirements and the constraints of the actuators in the design process. To accommodate lock-in-place faults, a new control effort redistribution scheme was proposed using the fuzzy logic technique, assuming faults are provided by a fault detection system. The results of simulation testing on a Boeing 747 multi-effector model showed that the system managed to handle these faults and maintain good tracking and stability performance, with some acceptable degradation in particular fault scenarios. The limitations of the controller to handle a high degree of faults were also presented

    Fault Diagnosis and Fault-Tolerant Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

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    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

    Optimal Control Prediction Method for Control Allocation

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    This paper proposes a novel prediction method for online optimal control allocation that extends the volume of moments achievable with the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse to the entire Attainable Moment Set. This method formulates the control allocation problem using selected basis vectors and associated gains which reduces the optimization problem dimensions and provides physical insight into the resulting optimal solutions. The proposed algorithm finds the entire family of unique optimal control solutions along the desired moment vector from the origin to the boundary of the Attainable Moment Set. Numerical results for the Moore-Penrose prediction method show that the unique minimal controls obtained yield the desired moment with near machine precision accuracy while maintaining control effectors within specified position limits. This method has been fully validated against the unique solution obtained on the boundary of the Attainable Moment Set using the Durham Direct Allocation method. Minimal control solutions obtained for moments in the interior of the Attainable Moment Set, similarly yield the desired moment to near machine precision while providing control solutions that are smaller (i.e. 2-norm) than solutions found with traditional control allocation algorithms (e.g. interior point methods) applied to the minimal control problem. Numerical simulations using a Matlab autocoded executable (MEX) for the representative real world problem of 3-moments with 20 individual control effectors and prescribed control position limits show a mean computation speed of approximately 125 Hz which is sufficient to enable real-time flight allocation

    Adaptive Control Allocation for Over-Actuated Systems with Actuator Saturation

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    This paper proposes an adaptive control allocation approach for over-actuated systems with actuator saturation. The methodology can tolerate actuator loss of effectiveness without utilizing the control input matrix estimation, eliminating the need for persistence of excitation. Closed loop reference model adaptive controller is used for identifying adaptive parameters, which provides improved performance without introducing undesired oscillations. The modular design of the proposed control allocation method improves the flexibility to develop the outer loop controller and the control allocation strategy separately. The ADMIRE model is used as an over-actuated system, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method using simulation results. © 201

    Design of a fault tolerant airborne digital computer. Volume 1: Architecture

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    This volume is concerned with the architecture of a fault tolerant digital computer for an advanced commercial aircraft. All of the computations of the aircraft, including those presently carried out by analogue techniques, are to be carried out in this digital computer. Among the important qualities of the computer are the following: (1) The capacity is to be matched to the aircraft environment. (2) The reliability is to be selectively matched to the criticality and deadline requirements of each of the computations. (3) The system is to be readily expandable. contractible, and (4) The design is to appropriate to post 1975 technology. Three candidate architectures are discussed and assessed in terms of the above qualities. Of the three candidates, a newly conceived architecture, Software Implemented Fault Tolerance (SIFT), provides the best match to the above qualities. In addition SIFT is particularly simple and believable. The other candidates, Bus Checker System (BUCS), also newly conceived in this project, and the Hopkins multiprocessor are potentially more efficient than SIFT in the use of redundancy, but otherwise are not as attractive

    Integrated approaches to handle UAV actuator fault

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    Unmanned AerialVehicles (UAV) has historically shown to be unreliable when compared to their manned counterparts. Part of the reason is they may not be able to a ord the redundancies required to handle faults from system or cost constraints. This research explores instances when actuator fault handling may be improved with integrated approaches for small UAVs which have limited actuator redundancy. The research started with examining the possibility of handling the case where no actuator redundancy remains post fault. Two fault recovery schemes, combing control allocation and hardware means, for a Quad Rotor UAV with no redundancy upon fault event are developed to enable safe emergency landing. Inspired by the integrated approach, a proposed integrated actuator control scheme is developed, and shown to reduce the magnitude of the error dynamics when input saturation faults occur. Geometrical insights to the proposed actuator scheme are obtained. Simulations using an Aerosonde UAV model with the proposed scheme showed significant improvements to the fault tolerant stuck fault range and improved guidance tracking performance. While much research literature has previously been focused on the controller to handle actuator faults, fault tolerant guidance schemes may also be utilized to accommodate the fault. One possible advantage of using fault tolerant guidance is that it may consider the fault degradation e ects on the overall mission. A fault tolerant guidance reconfiguration method is developed for a path following mission. The method provides an additional degree of freedom in design, which allows more flexibility to the designer to meet mission requirements. This research has provided fresh insights into the handling UAV extremal actuator faults through integrated approaches. The impact of this work is to expand on the possibilities a practitioner may have for improving the fault handling capabilities of a UAV

    Integral sliding mode fault tolerant control allocation for a class of affine nonlinear system

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    This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.This paper develops novel fault tolerant integral sliding mode control allocation schemes for a class of over-actuated affine nonlinear system. The proposed schemes rely on an existing baseline controller and the objective is to retain the nominal (fault-free) closed-loop performance in the face of actuator faults/failures by effectively utilizing actuator redundancy. The online control allocation reroutes the control effort to the healthy actuators using knowledge of the actuator effectiveness level estimates. One of the proposed schemes is tested in simulation using a well known high fidelity model of a large civil transport aircraft (B747) from the literature. Good simulation results show the efficacy of the scheme

    Novel frameworks for the design of fault-tolerant control using optimal sliding-mode control

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    Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This paper describes 2 schemes for a fault-tolerant control using a novel optimal sliding-mode control, which can also be employed as actuator redundancy management for overactuated uncertain linear systems. By using the effectiveness level of the actuators in the performance indexes, 2 schemes for redistributing the control effort among the remaining (redundant or nonfaulty) set of actuators are constructed based on an H2-based optimal sliding-mode control. In contrast to the current sliding-mode fault-tolerant control design methods, in these new schemes, the level of control effort required to maintain sliding is penalised. The proposed optimal sliding-mode fault-tolerant control design schemes are implemented in 2 stages. In the first stage, a state feedback gain is derived using an LMI-based scheme that can assign a number of the closed-loop eigenvalues to a known value whilst satisfying performance specifications. The sliding function matrix related to the particular state feedback derived in the first stage is obtained in the second stage. The difference between the 2 schemes proposed for the sliding-mode fault-tolerant control is that the second one includes a separate control allocation module, which makes it easier to apply actuator constraints to the problem. Moreover, it will be shown that, with the second scheme, we can deal with actuator faults or even failures without controller reconfiguration. We further discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the 2 schemes in more details. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes are illustrated with numerical examples

    Reconfigurable control allocation design with applications to unmanned aerial vehicle and aircraft

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    The main objective of this thesis is to design and evaluate reconfigurable flight control system against control surfaces faults in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and aircraft without modifying the baseline controller/control law by using control re-allocation technique. The faults are introduced in the form of partial loss and stuck at unknown positions of control surfaces on the UAV and aircraft. Four control reallocation algorithms with applications to UAV and fixed-wing aircraft were investigated, which include a pseudo-inverse, a fixed-point algorithm, a direct control allocation algorithm and a weighted least squares method. The thesis work is evaluated by a nonlinear UAV model ALTAV (Almost-Light-Than-Air-Vehicles), developed by Quanser Inc., and a nonlinear aircraft model ADMIRE (Aero-Data-Model-in-Research-Environment), developed by the Group of Aeronautical Research and Technology in Europe (GARTEUR). Different faults have been introduced in control surfaces with different commanded inputs. Gaussian noise was introduced in the ALTAV model. Different faults have been introduced in control surfaces with different command inputs. Comparisons were made under normal situation, fault conditions without control re-allocation, and with control reallocation. Simulation results show the satisfactory reconfigurable flight control system performance using control re-allocation methods for ALTAV UAV model and ADMIRE aircraft model
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