Recent advances in active fault tolerant flight control systems

Abstract

The Flight Control System (FCS) is considered as the brain of an aerial vehicle. It is a mechanism through which pilot’s commands are transferred to the actuators of the aircraft control surfaces. In order to ensure safety and increase reliability of aerial vehicles, development of fault tolerant FCSs has been the focus of research community for past few decades. Fault tolerant ability enables an aircraft to maintain satisfactory performance even in the state of a fault. Fault Tolerant Control Systems (FTCS) are categorized as passive and active control systems. Passive FTCS are designed to mitigate the effects of certain known faults. These faults can be related to sensor failure, actuator failure, or system component failure. On the other hand, active FTCS contain a controller reconfiguration mechanism, whereby, they can adjust the controller input online to mitigate the effects of the faults. In this way, they can accommodate complicated and versatile faults as compared to their passive counterparts. This paper presents a review of significant research during last decade in active fault tolerant control with applications to FCSs. A review of state-of-the-art works in this domain has also been presented. Upon review, these state-of-the-art research interests have been categorized into respective categories. Furthermore, research works have been cataloged based on their technology readiness levels. Based on these reviews, future research directions have also been highlighted.