Self-Healing Control Design under Actuator Fault Occurrence on Single-rotor Unmanned Helicopters

Abstract

Actuator faults are inevitable but affect reliability and safety of unmanned helicopters (UHs), especially when there are actuator constraints. In this paper, self-healing control, which is an extended active fault-tolerant control (FTC) method with reference redesign on-line, is proposed to analyze and to guarantee the safety of single-rotor UHs (SUHs) under both actuator faults and constraints. The safety includes body safety and mission safety. More specifically, body safety represents the stability of SUH itself and mission safety represents mission accomplishment with acceptable performance, furthermore, set-point tracking mission is considered. The main contribution of this paper is to analyze and to guarantee the safety of SUHs by solving a set of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) at one time. The set of LMIs includes saturation compensator design and stability guaranty with a given controller in the absence of actuator constraints, actuator fault compensation analysis, reference reachability analysis and reference redesign. On the other hand, by adding swashplate configuration, SUH model with real actuator outputs as control inputs is constructed which can describe actuator faults more clearly compared to SUH models with nominal control inputs. Finally, the proposed self-healing control method is illustrated by simulation with a nonlinear SUH model.