Gain-Scheduling Control of Flexible Aircraft with Actuator Saturation and Stuck Faults

Abstract

In this paper, a fault-tolerant control design that can gain schedule with the airspeed is developed for a flexible aircraft with actuator saturation and stuck control surface faults. First, a flexible aircraft model that captures the coupling between rigid-body motions and flexible modes is presented. Then, a linear parameter-varying fault-tolerant controller featuring a proportional and integral structure is designed for a stuck control surface scenario, with control gains solved from a set of set-invariant conditions represented by linear matrix inequalities. The controller, which gain schedules with the airspeed, is able to eliminate the effects of stuck faults on the system output while minimizing the effects on other system states and guaranteeing no closed-loop performance degradation caused by actuator saturation. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed design is demonstrated on an aircraft model with high-aspect-ratio wings in numerical simulations.