Soft Sensor Design for Fault Detection in ALV Pitch Gyro

Aerospace Launch Vehicles (ALVs), used for launching artificial satellites and space stations to Earth orbits, usually encounter with failure in navigation systems. In these cases, survival of an ALV during accurate payloads injection in orbits is one of the most critical issues for Guidance and Control systems.An important challenge for safety of Aerospace Launch Vehicle (ALV) is their reliability against all types of faults. There is a requirement for on-board fault detection without deteriorating the performance of ALV. In this paper, a new software sensor is proposed for fault detection and compensation based on symmetrical behavior of the yaw and pitch channels of an ALV. For this purpose, using identification techniques on the yaw channel, a new software sensor is developed as an online rigid dynamic predictor for the pitch channel. The proposed software sensor is employed to generate the residual of estimation error as an indicator of predefined faults. The main novelty of this software sensor is online tuning of the virtual sensor against unforeseen variations in the parameters of the vehicle. Robustness of the new control system in the presence of asymmetric behavior is investigated. The efficiency of the proposed fault tolerant method is illustrated through simulations.