Model Reference Sliding Mode Fault Tolerant Control of a BWB Aircraft

In the event of actuator faults and failures the total resources available to the controller can be severely reduced. In such cases it is important for the controller to be reconfigured to avoid saturating and overloading the remaining healthy actuators. Actuator saturation can lead to loss of system performance and in some cases, even instability. This paper proposes a method of reducing the closed-loop performance requirements through a scheduled reference model, with aim to minimise any saturation in the closed-loop system in the event of serious faults. The reference model is then tracked with a robust sliding mode control allocation scheme to ensure asymptotic tracking despite actuator faults/failures and uncertainty in their detection/estimation.