Fault Tolerant Control of a Civil Aircraft Using a Sliding Mode Based Scheme

This paper presents a sliding mode control scheme for reconfigurable control of a civil aircraft. The controller is based around a state-feedback sliding mode scheme where the nonlinear unit vector term is allowed to adaptively increase when the onset of a fault is detected. Compared to other fault tolerant controllers which have been implemented on this model, the controller proposed here is relatively simple and yet is shown to work across the entire `up and away´ fight envelope. Unexpected deviation of the switching variables from their nominal condition triggers the adaptation mechanism.