Incremental Nonlinear Adaptive Flight Control with Online System Identification

Research into previous flight accidents and investigations of the fault-tolerant flight control (FTFC) strategies used suggest that an aircraft, under many post-failure circumstances, can still achieve a certain level of flight performance using the remaining valid control effectors. However, the control authority or the safe flight envelope of the aircraft will inevitably shrink due to structural/actuator failures. Therefore, to avoid the flight accidents caused by Loss-of-control in flight (LOC-I) , it is necessary to employ suitable non-conventional control strategies to extract the most flight potential from a postfailure aircraft . One such promising control strategy is the fault-tolerant flight control (FTFC).