Flight Control Reconfiguration based on a Modular Approac

This paper describes a reconfiguring flight control algorithm for damaged aircraft based upon a modular approach. This approach combines real time physical model identification with adaptive nonlinear dynamic inversion. The sensitivity of NDI to modeling errors is eliminated here by making use of a real time identified model of the aircraft. In failure situations, the damaged aircraft model is identified by the two step method and this updated model is supplied to the model-based adaptive NDI routine, which reconfigures for the failure in real time. Reconfiguration test results for damaged aircraft models indicate good failure handling capabilities of this fault tolerant control setup, for component as well as structural failures.