Fault-tolerant flight control design with explicit consideration of reconfiguration transients

A new fault-tolerant flight control (FTFC) scheme is proposed by incorporating a reconfigurable controller and an adaptation mechanism. The unique advantages of the proposed scheme are that the bumpy transients can be notably prevented during the reconfigurable control switch and the remaining healthy actuators can be appropriately used in the presence of actuator failures while preventing the actuators from saturation. TheAero-DataModel inResearch Environment benchmark aircraft is chosen to validate the proposed method. Numerical simulation studies have demonstrated that the proposed FTFC law can significantly improve performance compared to an existing conventional FTFC scheme.