A neural network based approach to adaptive fault tolerant flight control

This work presents a neural network based approach to fault tolerant control of nonlinear flight control systems. The proposed scheme consists of three main components. First, a fault diagnosis scheme is designed to detect and identify automatically the occurrence of any faults. Second, a controller suite comprises a nominal controller and a neural network based adaptive fault tolerant controller designed to compensate for the effects of faults. Third, a reconfiguration supervisor makes decisions regarding controller reconfiguration. A simulation study using a nonlinear "Beaver" flight simulator illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and shows that flight safety is significantly improved by using the controller reconfiguration.