The minimal time detection algorithm of changes in control parameters and its application to flight systems

There exists a significant interest in enhancing current flight systems so that they can reconfigure the controls to maintain adequate levels of performance even if there are complete failures in one or more of the actuators or sensors. A control system is designed such that it can autonomously achieve a high level goal, while its components, plant models and control laws are not completely defined, either because they were not known at the design time or because they changed unexpected due to random changes. So, system parameters should be tracked on-line to build a highly adaptive control system even though there exists a random change. For this purpose, a new performance index that the author is developing is the speed of adaptation-how quickly does the system determine that a change occurred? Therefore, a new, robust algorithm that is optimized to minimize the time delay in detecting a change for a fixed false alarm probability is proposed. Simulation results show that the algorithm works fairly well and one of distinguishing properties is that detection delay of the algorithm is superior to that of the Whiteness test