Hybrid Adaptive Control for Tiltrotor Aircraft Flight Control Law Reconfiguration

Tiltrotor aircrafts have both fixed-wing control surfaces and helicopter rotors for attitude control. The redundancy of control surfaces provides the possibility for the control system to reconfigure the control law when actuator faults occur during flight. Possible actuator faults have been classified into two categories: predictable and unpredictable faults, and a different strategy has been adopted to deal with each kind of fault. Firstly, the predictable faults are handled by a multiple-model switching adaptive scheme. These kinds of faults are modeled, and their corresponding controllers are derived offline. Secondly, since the degree of drop in aerodynamic effectiveness cannot be predicted a priori, unpredictable faults are handled by a simple adaptive control scheme, to force the plant with faults to track the prescribed reference model. The presented methodology has been verified by nonlinear full-envelope flight simulation for both categories of actuator faults. The predictable fault is represented by the elevator floating. Elevator damage causing an aerodynamic effectiveness drop by 80% is chosen as the example of unpredictable fault. Both faults are simulated at the late stage of the tiltrotor conversion mode. Results show that the presented strategy of reconfiguration is able to detect the fault rapidly and stabilize the aircraft when a fault occurs, while the aircraft motion diverges without the reconfiguration scheme. The aircraft also presents a relatively good performance under controller reconfiguration with a well-tracked conversion path.