Reconfigurable fault tolerant flight control based on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control

Constrained Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) is shown to have potentials for reconfigurable fault tolerant control of highly nonlinear, intrinsically unstable, high performance aircraft. Results on fault tolerance of NMPC autopilots were obtained for an F-16 fighter aircraft model, without the implementation of any prestabilizing controllers. It has been shown that NMPC has inherent fault detection capabilities due to its effective utilization of feedback and its internal model predictions. Actuator (control surface) faults, including extreme cases of total actuator failure are examined as test cases for the NMPC reconfigurable fault tolerant control scheme developed in this work. The NMPC autopilots implementation and simulations were done using the ACADO nonlinear optimization solver.