Reconfigurable Controller for Active Fault-tolerant Control Systems with Applicability to Flight Control

In this paper we design a new reconfigurable controller for active fault-tolerant control systems with direct applicability to aircraft’s flight control. The reconfigurable controller is based on a new algorithm for the calculation of the controller gain matrix without using information from a full-order or reduced order observer. The main advantages of the reconfigurable controller, when no failures appear in the system, are related to a reduction in the number of embedded sensors, a decrease in costs, and the cancellation of the adverse effect on sensor errors. When the system is affected by sensor or actuator failures, the new reconfigurable controller may be used as a subsystem of a faulttolerant control system; the information from the broken sensors or actuators are not used and the system stabilization is carried out by using information only from the functional sensors and actuators.