Smart reconfigurable fault-tolerant flight control against actuator failures

In this study, active fault tolerant flight control technique with actuation reconfiguration is proposed. For this purpose two-stage Kalman filter (TSKF) is designed to identify the control distribution matrix elements corresponding to the faulty actuator, and a control reconfiguration action is taken to keep the performance of the impaired aircraft same as that of the unimpaired aircraft. Thus the control reconfiguration is carried out using identified control distribution matrix. In the simulations, the nonlinear flight dynamics of an AFTI/F-16 fighter model is considered, and actuator failure identification and reconfigurable control are examined.