A Historical Overview of Research in Reconfigurable Flight Control

This paper presents a historical overview of research in reconfigurable flight control with a focus on work done in the United States. For purposes of this paper, the term reconfigurable flight control is used to refer to software algorithms designed specifically to compensate for failures or damage of flight control effectors or lifting surfaces by using the remaining effectors to generate compensating forces and moments. This paper will discuss influences on the development of the concept of control reconfiguration and initial research and flight-testing of approaches based on explicit fault detection, isolation, and estimation as well as later approaches based on continuously adaptive and intelligent control algorithms. Also, approaches for trajectory reshaping of an impaired aircraft with reconfigurable inner loop control laws will be briefly discussed. Finally, there will be some discussion of current implementations of reconfigurable control to improve safety on production and flight test aircraft and remaining challenges to enable broader use of the technology such as the difficulties of flight certification of these types of approaches.