A fault-tolerant flight controller design for actuator faults

This paper presents a fault-tolerant flight controller design for actuator faults. Its principle is to use a new actuator fault estimation module which on-line estimates the actuator faults. The actuator faults are modeled in multiplicative form which is equal to one in the fault-free case and equal to actuator effectiveness when a fault occurs in the system. Output of the standard H-infinity flight controller is then re-configured to compensate the fault effect in the system. Performance of this method is tested in simulation on an F4-E aircraft to track a C* step command. Simulation results demonstrate good performance using the proposed design scheme.