Fault-tolerant control with mixed aerodynamic surfaces and RCS jets for hypersonic reentry vehicles

This paper proposes a fault-tolerant strategy for hypersonic reentry vehicles with mixed aerodynamic surfaces and reaction control systems (RCS) under external disturbances and subject to actuator faults. Aerodynamic surfaces are treated as the primary actuator in normal situations, and they are driven by a continuous quadratic programming (QP) allocator to generate torque commanded by a nonlinear adaptive feedback control law. When aerodynamic surfaces encounter faults, they may not be able to provide sufficient torque as commanded, and RCS jets are activated to augment the aerodynamic surfaces to compensate for insufficient torque. Partial loss of effectiveness and stuck faults are considered in this paper, and observers are designed to detect and identify the faults. Based on the fault identification results, an RCS control allocator using integer linear programming (ILP) techniques is designed to determine the optimal combination of activated RCS jets. By treating the RCS control allocator as a quantization element, closed-loop stability with both continuous and quantized inputs is analyzed. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.