Two Reconfigurable Control Allocation Schemes for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Under Stuck Actuator Failures

Two reconfigurable control allocation (called also as control reallocation) schemes for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) under stuck actuator failures have been proposed in this paper. The two control reallocation algorithms include a cascaded generalized inverse algorithm and a fixed-point algorithm. The performance of the two algorithms has been evaluated with a UAV model known as ALTAV (Almost-Lighter-Than-Air-Vehicle). Different stuck faults on the actuators have been implemented in the ALTAV benchmark and used for evaluating the control reallocation schemes. An effective re-distribution of the control surface deflections with the remaining healthy control actuators is used in order to achieve acceptable performance in the presence of control actuator failures. Comparisons were made among the two algorithms with different commanded inputs. Simulation results show the effectiveness of reconfigurable control allocation algorithms for handling stuck failures in such a UAV with less hardware redundancy.