Reconfigurable control of an UAV against sensor/actuator failures

An active fault-tolerant flight control system against sensor/actuator failures for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is proposed. In the case of sensor faults, the faulty sensor is isolated, and the Kalman filter (KF) that ignores the feedback from the faulty sensor, is built. If the fault is an actuator fault, the actuator fault isolation and identification are performed. For this purpose the partial loss and stuck faults in the actuators are isolated and identified by the two-stage KF. The parameters of the feedback controller are tuned by the control reconfiguration procedure. In the simulations, the longitudinal and lateral dynamics of the UAV model is considered, and reconfigurable flight control against sensor/actuator failures is implemented.