Reconfigurable flight control system design using direct adaptive method

A reconfigurable flight control system provides better survivability through the automatic reconfiguration of control system when faults occur during flight. The adaptive control method has been effectively applied to the reconfigurable flight control system design. However, reconfigurable flight control systems based on the indirect adaptive control method require persistent input excitation and smooth input-output data. To deal with the persistent input excitation problem and to obtain smooth control input, the system identification algorithm in reconfiguration flight control systems usually imposes some constraints on past input-output data, which may deteriorate the reconfiguration performance. Thus, a new reconfigurable flight control system based on the direct adaptive method is proposed to achieve better reconfiguration performance without the system identification process. The proposed control method uses a model following controller with direct adaptive update rules. To control the inner-loop states and the outer-loop states of the flight system simultaneously, the timescale separation principle is applied. The reconfiguration performance of the proposed control method is evaluated through numerical simulations using a six-degree-of-freedom nonlinear aircraft model.