Fault diagnosis, failure prognosis and fault tolerant control of aerospace/unmanned aerial systems

Fault-tolerant control and operation of complex unmanned and aircraft systems is an emerging technology intended to provide the designer and operator with flexibility, interoperability, sustainment and reliability under changing operational requirements or mission profiles. Moreover, it is intended to reconfigure online hardware and software to maintain the operational integrity of the system in the event of contingencies (fault/failure modes). This paper presents an hierarchical architecture that uses available sensor information, fault isolation, failure prognosis, system restructuring and controller reconfiguration. The fault tolerant control framework relies on prognostic information to reconfigure system components and preserve the operational integrity of the aircraft. The hierarchical structure starts at the lowest component level and migrates to the middle system/subsystem level ending with the final mission level. We illustrate the methodology using an electro-mechanical actuator (EMA).