High Redundancy Actuator Research Project – Summary

Every technical system is subject to faults. In safety critical applications such as aircrafts or chemical factories, special measures need to be taken to address the possibility of faults. This is what fault tolerant control is about: analyse the effect of faults, and prevent them from causing trouble (see [1] for a more detailed overview). This project proposel a novel idea for fault tolerant control: instead of a single actuator, a high number of redundant actuator elements can be used (see Figure 1). Every single elements contributes only a little bit to the function of the whole actuator, so a single fault has little influence on the overall performance.