Historical Overview of Research in Reconfigurable Flight Control

Abstract

This article presents a historical overview of research in reconfigurable flight control. For the purpose of this article, the term 'reconfigurable flight control' is used to refer to software algorithms designed specifically to compensate for failures or damage of flight control effectors or lifting surfaces, using the remaining effectors to generate compensating forces and moments. This article will discuss initial research and flight testing of approaches based on explicit fault detection, isolation, and estimation, as well as later approaches based on continuously adaptive and intelligent control algorithms. In addition, approaches for trajectory reshaping of an impaired aircraft with reconfigurable inner loop control laws will be briefly discussed. Finally, there will be some discussion on current implementations of reconfigurable control to improve safety on production and flight test aircraft and remaining challenges to enable broader use of the technology, such as the difficulties of flight certification of these types of approaches.

Self-Correcting HVAC Controls Project Final Report

“…Although automated self-correction of faults is a new concept in the HVAC field, it has been under development in the aircraft field for nearly 30 years (Tomayko 2003, Steinberg 2005. Moreover, PNNL completed an early exploratory study of a small number of fault correction procedures for example devices and automated one example for a computer-based simulated economizer system prior to this project.…”

“…Work in self-repairing flight control began in earnest in the late 1970s and early 1980s primarily to improve the ability of aircraft to respond to physical faults or damage to physical flight control surfaces (wings, elevators, ailerons, etc.) and actuators controlling those surfaces to enable the aircraft to safely land while subject to these faults and failures (Tomayko 2003, Steinberg 2005. The general approach has been to enable the aircraft to continue to operate usually for a limited time until it can land, albeit with degraded performance, despite the presence of faults.…”

Adaptive Backstepping Flight Control for Modern Fighter Aircraft

“…lifting surfaces). This section is based on survey papers on reconfigurable flight control by Huzmezan [84], Jones [92] and Steinberg [195]. Other relevant articles are the more general fault-tolerant control surveys by Stengel [197] and Patton [162].…”

“…Similarly, the control approaches could require quite a bit of design tuning and there was a lack of theoretical proofs of stability and robustness. However, these approaches were shown to be quite effective when optimized for a small number of failure cases [195]. The increase of onboard computational power and advanced control development software packages in the 1990's led to an rapid increase in the number and types of approaches applied to RFC problems.…”

Active Fault Diagnosis and Major Actuator Failure Accommodation: Application to a UAV

“…Fault-tolerant control (FTC) strategy has received considerable attention from the control research community and aeronautical engineering in the last two decades (Steinberg, 2005). An exhaustive and recent bibliographical review for FTC is presented in (Zhang & Jiang, 2008).…”