Challenges, opportunities, and developments on fault-tolerant control with applications to autonomous unmanned systems

Unmanned systems including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/Systems (UAVs or UASs), Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), and Unmanned Surface/Underwater Vehicles (USVs/UUVs), etc. are gaining more and more attention during the last few years due to their important contributions and cost-effective applications in several tasks such as surveillance, sense, search, rescue, geographic studies, military and security applications. On the other hand, health management and faulttolerant control of manned aerial vehicles have a long history since the initial research on self-repairing flight control systems in US Air Force and NASA begun in mid-1980s. However, due to safety concern of manned aerial vehicles to the pilot, experimental tests and further practical research and development have been limited. Benefited from the recent and significant advance and development of UAVs, development and application of autonomous, fault-tolerant, as well as cooperative control techniques have been emerged and developed quickly in recent years, since UAVs provide a cheap and operative experimental testbed for development, implementation, testing and validation of the newly developed autonomous, fault-tolerant, as well as cooperative guidance, navigation and control techniques. In this talk, a brief review on the development of faulttolerant control techniques in the manned aircraft systems will be presented firstly, then the challenges and opportunities on autonomy and fault-tolerant control of unmanned systems will be given secondly, and finally the latest developments and current research work in this active research and development area with applications to autonomous fixed-wing and rotary-wing UAVs will be presented.