Guidance, Control and Navigation for Aerospace Systems: Charles Stark Draper's influence on a Personal Perspective

A vehicle health monitoring system based on analytical redundancy, is developed for automated passenger vehicles. A residual generator and a residual processor are designed together to detect and identify actuator and sensor faults of the Buick LeSabre rapidly. The residual generator includes fault detection filters and parity equations. It uses the control commands and sensor measurements to generate the residuals, which have a unique static pattern in response to each fault. Then, the residual processor interrogates the residuals by matching them to one of several known patterns. It computes the probability of each hypothesis conditioned on the history of residuals. The fault detection latency is reduced by integrating the design of the residual generator and the residual processor. The vehicle health monitoring system is evaluated in real-time on a Buick LeSabre. The vehicle sensor and actuator faults are simulated artificially by the computer or created manually by the driver. In one experiment, a real intermittent sensor fault occurred and was immediately detected and identified. The real-time evaluation demonstrates that the vehicle health monitoring system can detect and identify actuator and sensor faults under various disturbances and uncertainties with almost minimal detection latency.