Development of a fault tolerant flight control system

Abstract

This work discusses the design and development of a fault tolerant flight control system as a part of the research requirement of the Author's Master's Degree Thesis. The requirements of safety critical systems, reliable systems, fault tolerant systems, avionics and embedded systems were considered for this project. Byzantine resilience and common mode fault avoidance are considered beyond the scope of this work at this time. The fault tolerant system designed for this work was set up as a triple modular redundant system to tolerate the existence of one fault within the system. The system was implemented with the PC/104 embedded PC platform. Microsoft flight simulator was used as a test platform to generate input data and to demonstrate successful operation by showing a flight under control by the flight control system. The end results show that a fault tolerant system can be developed to successfully tolerate one fault while the system is in operation.