Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Control for Attitude Tracking of a Carrier-Based Aircraft Subject to Actuator Faults

This paper presents a fault-tolerant attitude tracking control for carrier-based aircraft subject to actuator faults. The proposed controller adopts nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI) to ensure asymptotic attitude tracking for the fault-free attitude system, and employs $\mathcal {L}_{1}$ piecewise constant adaptive law to compensate for errors caused by actuator lock-in-place(LIP) faults. Theoretical analysis indicates that by reducing the sampling time of the adaptive law, performance difference bounds of the closed-loop $\mathcal {L}_{1}$ adaptive system and the closed-loop reference system can be adjusted to be arbitrarily small. The fault-tolerant performance of the proposed method is supported by data acquired from flight tests.