Adaptive Actuator Failure Compensation Control: A New Scheme Based on Fault Detection and Isolation

In flight control systems, multiple actuator stuck (or hardover) failures would cause saturation of the remaining healthy actuators and result in system instability. In this article, a new adaptive actuator failure compensation control scheme is proposed for a class of nonlinear systems with multiple redundant inputs. Under a mild assumption on the time interval between two successive failures, an online fault detection and isolation (FDI) algorithm is introduced, with which an actuator failure can be exactly identified in a given finite time without using the persistent excitation (PE) condition. The main advantage of the proposed scheme is that with the help of the FDI algorithm, an actuator with stuck failure (SF) can be deactivated before a new failure occurs and therefore, the drawback of the current adaptive failure compensation control approach that may cause more control effort or even saturation with multiple actuators being stuck can be overcome.