Viability Under Degraded Control Authority

In this letter, we solve the problem of quantifying and mitigating control authority degradation in real time. Here, our target systems are controlled nonlinear affine-in-control evolution equations with finite control input and finite- or infinite-dimensional state. We consider two cases of control input degradation: finitely many affine maps acting on unknown disjoint subsets of the inputs and general Lipschitz continuous maps. These degradation modes are encountered in practice due to actuator wear and tear, hard locks on actuator ranges due to over-excitation, as well as more general changes in the control allocation dynamics. We derive sufficient conditions for identifiability of control authority degradation, and propose a novel real-time algorithm for identifying or approximating control degradation modes. We demonstrate our method on a nonlinear distributed parameter system, namely a one-dimensional heat equation with a velocity-controlled moveable heat source, motivated by autonomous energy-based surgery.