Effector failure mitigation by control allocation for a UAV with integrated fluidic control devices

Fixed-wing aircraft effector failures can manifest themselves in a variety of ways, including but not limited to: neutral failures where the effector resides at neutral position, and hard failure where the effector saturations at an upper or lower limit. This paper presents an approach for effector failure mitigation, namely control allocation by an optimal weighted pseudo-inverse method. The method is explained and applied to a model of the DEMON UAV which has both conventional aerosurfaces and integrated fluidic control devices. The control allocator is tested for effector failure mitigation on a full 6 DOF simulation of the DEMON UAV, and shown to provide successful allocation in the event of a hard effector failure.