Reconfigurable control allocation against partial control effector faults in aircraft

Due to the increased requirements on the reliability, maneuverability and survivability of modern and future aircraft, more control effectors/surfaces are being introduced. This requires the control allocation function, together with baseline ight control law, to be implemented in the overall ight control systems. In particular, in the case of control effector (actuator) failures or control surface damages, an effective redistribution (or re-allocation) of the control surface deections with the remaining healthy control effectors is needed in order to achieve acceptable performance even in the presence of control effector faults. In this paper, as a preliminary study of recongurable control allocation (control re-allocation) applied to a realistic and nonlinear aircraft model, a pseudo-inverse method is implemented and tested in an ADMIRE (Aero-Data Model In Research Environment) benchmark aircraft model. Partial loss of control effectiveness faults have been implemented in the ADMIRE benchmark and used for evaluating a pseudoinverse based control re-allocation scheme. Simulation results show satisfactory results for accommodating the partial loss of control effectiveness of control effectors.