Fault-tolerant control system for unmanned aerial vehicle using smart actuators and control allocation

This paper presents a FTNCS (Fault-Tolerant Networked Control System) that can tolerate control surface failure and packet delay/loss in an UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). The proposed method utilizes the benefits of self-diagnosis by smart actuators along with the control allocation technique. A smart actuator is an intelligent actuation system combined with microprocessors to perform self-diagnosis and bi-directional communications. In the event of failure, the smart actuator provides the system supervisor with a set of actuator condition data. The system supervisor then compensate for the effect of faulty actuators by re-allocating redundant control surfaces based on the provided actuator condition data. In addition to the compensation of faulty actuators, the proposed FTNCS also includes an efficient algorithm to deal with network induced delay/packet loss. The proposed algorithm is based on a Lagrange polynomial interpolation method without any mathematical model of the system. Computer simulations with an UAV show that the proposed FTNCS can achieve a fast and accurate tracking performance even in the presence of actuator faults and network induced delays.