Self-healing control against actuator stuck failures under constraints: Application to unmanned helicopters

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of actuator stuck failures under constraints. In order to guarantee the post-failure system stability and acceptable performance, self-healing control framework is proposed which includes self-healing management module, fault-tolerant controller, reference redesigner and anti-windup compensator. Because of the existence of actuator constraints, the post-failure system may be unstable and the reference may be unreachable. Hence, fault-tolerant controller with anti-windup compensator was used to guarantee stability which was proved by introducing H∞ performance. Reachability of reference was analyzed by self-healing management module and a new reference could be calculated by reference redesigner. At last, the proposed self-healing framework was applied to a linear unmanned helicopter model for velocities and yaw tracking control.