Fault tolerant sliding modes control allocation with control surface priority weighting

This paper presents an on-line sliding mode control allocation scheme for fault tolerant control with the capability of prioritizing certain control surfaces over the others. This capability is achieved through the choice of the novel fixed priority weights tuned during the design process. During faults and even total failures, the effectiveness level of the actuators is used by the control allocation scheme to redistribute the control signals to the remaining actuators. The simulation results show the capability of the controller in nominal conditions, and its capability to directly handle faults and even total failures, with almost no degradation in performance, without reconfiguring the controller.