On the synthesis of a sliding-mode-observer-based adaptive fault-tolerant flight control scheme

This paper presents an active Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) framework to accommodate the actuator faults by using a Fault Estimation (FE) module fitted with an adaptive control law. It focuses on the problem of fault estimation based fault tolerant control for linear uncertain system with mitigation of the reconfiguration transients. In this work, a second-order sliding mode observer is designed to reconstruct the Loss of Effectiveness (LoE) of the actuators. The use of a bumpless strategy to cleverly manage the transient behavior where fault estimation is different from the real one due to an abrupt fault occurrence. Signals provided by the FE module are next used by an augmented fault-tolerant control allocation scheme to accommodate the fault. More precisely, the flight state tracking problem has been addressed with a robust adaptive model-reference Integral Sliding Mode (ISM) control law in a state feedback setting. Next, the problem of stability and performance of the overall FTC scheme with taking into account both FE performance and control law is rigorously considered. At the end, simulation examples on an aircraft from a European program are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.