Networked fault-tolerant control allocation for multiple actuator failures

This paper proposes intelligent fault-tolerant control technique using network. Not only control commands generated by a controller but also diagnostic data for tolerating failures can be transmitted through network. In this paper, fault-tolerant control allocation method (FTCA) is proposed to tolerate failures in more than one actuator. FTCA is based on a well-known actuator management technique called control allocation (CA). While the conventional CA is used to redistribute actuators optimally, FTCA redistributes actuators to compensate for the performance degradation due to actuator failure. To analyze the effects of faulty actuator, this paper proposes the general model of the faulty system firstly. And then the modified CA for tolerating the effect of failure is proposed. The performance of the proposed FTCA method is verified by the numerical simulations with application to F-18 High Alpha Research Vehicle (HARV).