Design of Fault Tolerant Controller in Flight Control System

Any defect in the flight control system may cause an irreparable problem. Typically, a highly reliable system with human decision-making power is used to prevent or correct such errors in a flying vehicle. A fault tolerant control system is designed to deal with various types of errors that may occur in the system. Fault-tolerant control systems are divided into two main parts. The first part is the error detection and isolation phase and the second part is the control system design phase to overcome the error effects in the system, depending on the type of error and the location of the error, whether the sensor, actuator, or components, the control system must be able to eliminate error effects. In this paper, a neural-adaptive observer is used in the error detection stage, and in the second stage, a control system is designed based on the back-stepping algorithm. Nonlinear six-degree-of-freedom simulation results for an F-18 aircraft model indicate its suitable efficiency in the detection and compensation of fault effects.