Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Directional Control of an Autonomous Airship against Actuator Fault

This paper is concerned with the problem of adaptive fault-tolerant H-infinity directional control for an autonomous airship with rudder fault. The type of fault considered is the loss of rudder effectiveness. Based on the online estimation of an eventual fault, an H-infinity adaptive fault-tolerant directional controller design method is adopted, in which a compensate control law is added to reduce the effect of rudder failure. Different from the existing works about fault-tolerant control (FTC) for airship, the technique utilized in this paper is not dependent on fault detection and isolation (FDI) mechanism. Simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of proposed method.