Fault tolerant linear parameter varying flight control design, verification and validation

This article presents the design, verification, and validation of a fault tolerant linear parameter varying controller for JAXA's MuPAL-[alfa] aircraft. The design focuses on the synthesis of a lateral/directional LPV controller robust to velocity changes and actuator uncertainty, and with the scheduling variable chosen to make it fault tolerant to aileron and/or rudder loss-of-efficiency faults. The verification activities include linear, frequency and time, analyses as well as time-domain simulations ¿the latter with the LPV controller as it will be implemented in the aircraft. The validation is performed in the so-called Aircraft-In-the-Loop, which is best described as a type of aircraft Iron-Bird test-bench where the full aircraft is connected in the hangar to an external computer that allows to introduce exogenous effects (such as wind/gust) while using pilot, or also computer user-defined, commands. The verification and validation results show very good robustness and fault tolerance characteristics of the LPV controller for a wide set of fault conditions and speeds. The article discusses in detail the design and implementation issues for such type of controllers.

aircraft control; controllers; flight control systems; frequency domain analysis; time domain analysis; control validations design; verification fault-tolerant; flight control design; linear-parameter varying controllers; uncertainty velocity changes; verification-and-validation fault tolerance

Fault tolerant linear parameter varying flight control design, verification and validation Articles