Retrofit reconfigurable flight control in the presence of control effector damage

In this paper the development and implementation of an integrated retrofit reconfigurable flight control design for control effector damage compensation is presented. The proposed damage-adaptive control system has the capability of detecting and identifying flight-critical actuator failures and control effector damage, and rejecting the state-dependent disturbances arising due to the asymmetry of the damaged vehicle. The proposed damage-adaptive control system is an extension of the fast on-line-actuator recovery enhancement (FLARE) system that rapidly and accurately detects and identifies actuator failures and the loss of gain of control effectors. The algorithm for estimating the nonlinearities arising due to the damage is based on variable structure control (VSC) and results in a system in which explicit performance bounds can be calculated.