Experimental evaluation of actuator fault accommodation for small UAV

Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, sUAVs, are perceived unsuitable to fly and co-exist within the civilian airspace. This is due to their low reliability compared to full scale manned aircraft. Flight crashes due to system malfunction and operator error contribute to the low reliability. The objective of this research is to investigate on how to smoothly transfer pitch control from elevator to stabilator of a small UAV. This paper presents the investigation of using alternate control surface in the occurrence of failure to an elevator actuator during flight. Parametric tools used in proposing the mitigating solutions of faulty elevator actuator include design of the UAV platform, wind tunnel validation and flight test results. From the analysis, the proposed method is feasible to be used without affecting flight endurance and characteristics during flight control transition. The alternate control surface accommodation technique proves to promise higher reliability in case of faulty on-board actuator.