Development and Evaluation of Fault-Tolerant Flight Control for RLV by Mutual Compensation with Available Aerosurfaces

Abstract

In this paper, a fault-tolerant controller capable of dealing with aerosurface actuator malfunctions is proposed. Fault-tolerant flight control is expected to be one of key technologies for future RLV (reusable launch vehicles) to improve on safety and mission success rate. The presented controller has remarkable feature to improve fault-tolerance with minimum aerosurfaces or without any upgrade of actuators. This is because the controller makes available aerosurfaces mutually compensate each other by taking advantage of their characteristics. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is confirmed with linear and nonlinear analyses through HOPE-X approach and landing phase as an example.