Fault-tolerant control of a multi-actuator agricultural aircraft against actuator failures

Because of the high failure rate of the agricultural fixed-wing aircraft due to the terrible working environment, this paper mainly discusses applying robust fault-tolerant control algorithm and Reaction Control System (RCS) actuator to the flight control system when the multi-actuator aircraft is with actuator failures. Firstly, the self-repairing flight control system structure based on dynamic-inversion emergency control law is studied. According to the flight task of plant protection, the flight control system is divided into two loops based on time-scale separation principle. Main control law design uses the dynamic inversion control method, and the compensation control law is based on dynamic compensation of the adaptive Neural Network (NN). When the elevator or rudder fault occurs in the system, three adaptive NN compensation controllers are activated to counteract the fault's influence in the angular velocity loop. Finally, for two typical faults, the simulations of robust fault-tolerant controller based on the neural network are demonstrated respectively. The stability and effectiveness of proposed algorithms are verified.