Adaptive Flight Control Systems in Presence of Actuator Failures

Actuator failures can cause control system performance deterioration and even lead to instability and catastrophic accidents and incidents. Therefore, the adaptive control of damaged aircraft in designing flight control systems to enhance safety level has recently become the subject of research. Damage causes structural changes and parametric uncertainties which need a new modeling and control approach. In this paper, firstly, a nominal control design based on linear quadratic regulator design is used and shown that the linear quadratic regulator design is not capable of coping with the unknown actuator failure and cannot achieve satisfactory performance. Then, a feedback adaptive signal is designed based on direct approach to handle uncertain actuator failures in linearized system. The adaptive control scheme is applied to the linearized model of a large transport aircraft in which the longitudinal and lateral motions are coupled as the result of using engine differential thrusts. The type of damage which is considered for actuators in this paper is lock-in-place which means control surfaces are fixed in an uncertain value after damage. Analytical stability analysis and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.