Development and Application of an LPV Fault Tolerant Integral Sliding Mode Control Allocation Scheme for the RECONFIGURE Benchmark Model

Abstract

This paper considers a novel fault-tolerant integral sliding mode control allocation (ISM/CA) scheme that has the capability to maintain closed-loop nominal performance in the presence of faults/failures by effectively managing the actuator redundancy, and without reconfiguring the underlying control law. The proposed scheme relies on a a-posteri approach, i.e. building on an existing baseline controller designed using only the primary actuators. In the absence of faults/failures, the ISM/CA controller will have identical performance to the original one. Only in the face of faults or failures will the effect of the sliding mode control component be seen. This component will then attempt to maintain nominal fault-free performance despite the presence of faults/failures. The proposed scheme uses measured (or estimated) actuator effectiveness levels in order to redistribute the control signals to the healthy ones, which allows a certain class of total actuator failures to be compensated for. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is tested in simulation using a high-fidelity nonlinear model of a large transport aircraft associated with the RECONFIGURE project.