Fault-tolerant vibration control in a networked and embedded rocket fairing system

Active vibration control using piezoelectric actuators in a networked and embedded environment has been widely applied to solve the rocket fairing vibration problem. However, actuator failures may lead to performance deterioration or system dysfunction. To guarantee the desired system performance, the remaining actuators should be able to coordinate with each other to compensate for the damaging effects caused by the failed actuator in a timely manner. Further, in the networked control environment, timing issues such as sampling jitter and network-induced delay should be considered in the controller design. In this study, a timing compensation approach is implemented in an adaptive actuator failure compensation controller to maintain the fairing system performance by also considering the detrimental effects from real-time constraints. In addition, time-delay compensation in the networked control system is discussed, which is able to reduce damaging effects of networkinduced delays.