Reconfigurable flight control design using multiple switching controllers and online estimation of damage-related parameters

We describe the implementation of a failure detection and identification (FDI) and adaptive reconfigurable control (ARC) scheme based on estimation of the damage-related parameter and switching among multiple controllers in the nonlinear 6-DOF simulation of Boeing's tailless advanced fighter aircraft (TAFA). Due to the nonlinear nature of the simulation, the implementation and tuning of the algorithms is substantially more complicated than in the case of linear simulations. However, the well tuned FDI-ARC achieves excellent performance despite severe flight-critical variations in the aircraft dynamics. This is the result of combining judiciously many advanced control techniques, including inverse dynamics control law, multiple models, switching and tuning, stable adaptive observers and controllers, high-gain and variable-structure observer terms, and gain scheduled controllers and adaptive gains for the estimation of the wing damage level.