Fault Detection and Fault-Tolerant Control of a Civil Aircraft Using a Sliding-Mode-Based Scheme

This paper presents a sliding-mode approach for fault-tolerant control of a civil aircraft, where both actuator and sensor faults are considered. For actuator faults, a controller is designed around a state-feedback sliding-mode scheme where the gain of the nonlinear unit vector term is allowed to adaptively increase at the onset of a fault. Unexpected deviation of the switching variables from their nominal condition triggers the adaptation mechanism. The controller proposed here is relatively simple and yet is shown to work across the entire "up and away" flight envelope. For sensor faults, the application of a robust method for fault reconstruction using a sliding-mode observer is considered. The novelty lies in the application of the sensor fault reconstruction scheme to correct the corrupted measured signals before they are used by the controller, and therefore the controller does not need to be reconfigured.