Robust H_∞ and adaptive tracking control against actuator faults with a linearised aircraft application

Abstract

This article studies the problem of designing adaptive fault-tolerant H _∞ tracking controllers for a class of aircraft flight systems against general actuator faults and bounded perturbations. A robust adaptive state-feedback controller is constructed by a stabilising controller gain and an adaptive control gain function. Using mode-dependent Lyapunov functions, linear matrix inequality-based conditions are developed to find the controller gain such that disturbance attenuation performance is optimised. Adaptive control schemes are proposed to estimate the unknown controller parameters on-line for unparametrisable stuck faults and perturbation compensations. Based on Lyapunov stability theory, it is shown that the resulting closed-loop systems can guarantee asymptotic tracking with H _∞ performances in the presence of faults on actuators and perturbations. An application to a decoupled linearised dynamic aircraft system and its simulation results are given.

Keywords:

• fault-tolerant tracking control
• flight control
• robust H _∞ control
• adaptive control
• linear matrix inequalities
• actuator faults

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Funds for Creative Research Groups of China (No. 60821063), National 973 Program of China (Grant No. 2009CB320604), the Funds of National Science of China (Grant No. 60974043), the 111 Project (B08015) and the Funds of Doctoral Program of Ministry of Education, China (20100042110027).