Tracking Control of Vertical Tail Damaged Aircraft with dissimilar Actuator Configuration

This article presents a new control scheme for an aircraft that has suffered from actuator failure due to severe damage to its vertical tail. The damaged degree of the vertical tail is treated as uncertainty. Firstly an output feedback controller is designed for the nominal lateral dynamic model of aircraft. However, when the actuator's fault/failure occurs, the idea of generalized virtual actuators is adopted. In this way, the same baseline controller is used even in the presence of fault/failure. Linear matrix inequality is used to compute the controller and virtual actuator's gains. The simulation results show good tracking performance and fault-tolerant competency.