NonLinear Fault Tolerant Flight Control for generic actuators fault models

This paper presents an Active Fault Tolerant Flight Control applied to an aircraft nonlinear longitudinal model in presence of simultaneous faults on both elevator and thrust actuators. The overall control system is based on a Fault Detection and Diagnosis module, designed by the NonLinear Geometric Approach, allowing fault isolation. Is consists of adaptive filters based on Radial Basis Functions Neural Network, which provides the estimation of generic faults. These estimates are exploited to reconfigure the controller by means of a further feedback loop. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this work represents the first application of such Active Fault Tolerant Control to an aircraft control system. The simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, which maintains the aircraft in a safe flight envelope in case of actuator faults.