Reconfigurable flight control laws for re-entry vehicles

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel Reconfigurable Control System for reentry vehicles, based on an adaptive control strategy combined with a control allocation approach to deal with a hybrid effectors set, i.e. aerodynamic surface and reaction control system (RCS). This control strategy guarantees improved robustness against uncertain, highly time-variant flight dynamics and at the same time it allows us to deal with effector failures due to reconfiguration capabilities ensured by control allocation. Furthermore control allocation is also used to optimally distribute the control effort among available control effectors by taking into account the RCS fuel consumption. The effectiveness of the novel solution has been demonstrated through a numerical analysis both in nominal and single failure scenarios.