Fault Tolerant Control Using Sliding Modes for Scale Model of a High Altitude Long Endurance Aircraft

Abstract

This paper presents a fault-tolerant control scheme for a scale model of a High-Altitude Long Endurance UAV. The aircraft considered in this paper is a scale model glider that has a similar configuration to typical HALE platforms. The proposed control system was designed using sliding mode and control allocation to handle actuator faults. To evaluate the performance of the system, simulations were conducted using a nonlinear fixed-aerodynamic model. The results are promising, since the control system was able to handle multiple actuator failure cases.