Time Delay Fault Tolerant Controller for Actuator Failures during Aircraft Autolanding

A time delay control methodology is adopted to cope with degraded control performance due to control surface damage of unmanned aerial vehicles, especially in the case of the automatic landing phase. It is a crucial challenge to maintain consistent control performance even under fault environments such as stuck and/or incipient actuator faults. Flight control systems designed using conventional feedback control methods in such cases may result in unsatisfactory performance, and even worse, may not guarantee the closed-loop stability, which is fatal for aircraft in the state of auto-landing. To overcome the shortfalls of the conventional approach, the time delay control scheme is adopted. This scheme is known to be robust against disturbance, model uncertainties and so on. Motivated by the fact that the abrupt and/or incipient actuator faults focused on in this paper could be considered as model uncertainties, we consider the application of the time delay controller to designing a fault tolerant control system. To show the effectiveness of the time delay control method, a nonlinear 6-DOF simulation is performed under model uncertainties and wind disturbances, and control performance is compared with that of conventional controllers in the case of multiple and single actuator faults.