Adaptive Control Allocation for Flight Systems with Stuck Actuator Failures

This paper proposes an adaptive control allocation method for flight systems in the presence of stuck actuator failures and model mismatch. During the flight, some unknown actuators are stuck at unknown values and at unknown time instants, which badly influence the system stability. The method can adaptively allocate the control power to the operating actuators based on the failure pattern. More realistic situation that incorporates model mismatch caused by icing, modeling errors and damage is also be considered in this paper. The traditional reference model is not appropriate, and an adaptive reference model is designed to solve this problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is simulated by a longitudinal linear model of the NASA Generic Transport Model. The simulation results show that this method gives better tracking error performance.