Fault-Tolerant Flight Control System Design Against Control Surface Impairments

An active fault-tolerant flight control system design technique against control surface impairments is proposed here. The aircraft control surface impairments are modeled as a polytopic linear parameter varying (LPV) system. Relying on the existing control surface redundancy of the aircraft, both state feedback and static output feedback controllers are synthesized against various degrees of control surface impairments. Simulation examples of an aircraft subject to inner elevon impairments have been used to illustrate the design process and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.