Fault Detection and Fault Tolerant Control for a Prandtl Wing UAV

In the literature several control schemes exist which utilise knowledge of an actuator’s saturation limits to ensure feasible control signals and prevent the associated performance loss caused by saturating actuators. To increase the applicability of these schemes to scenarios where the saturation limits may vary (due to faults/failures or changes in the operating conditions), this paper proposes a fault detection and isolation scheme which is able to estimate both an actuator’s health and its saturation limits. The proposed scheme is tested within an optimised control allocation and sliding mode control framework for robust fault tolerant control of a Prandtl wing aircraft.