Adaptive Accommodation of System Actuator Failures and Structural Damage for Aircraft Flight Control Applications

Speaker: Gang Tao

Affiliation: University of Virginia, USA

Time: Monday 24/06/2013 from 13:00 to 14:00

Venue: Access Grid UWS. Presented from Penrith (Y239), accessible from Parramatta (EB.1.32) and Campbelltown (26.1.50).

Abstract:

System faults such as actuator failures and structural damage can cause control system performance deterioration and even lead to instability and catastrophic accidents. Effective compensation of uncertain failures and damage is crucial for performance-critical systems. In this talk, we present some of our recently developed adaptive failure and damage compensation techniques.

Actuator failures are characterized by some unknown system inputs which are stuck at some unknown fixed or varying values at unknown time instants and cannot be influenced by applied control signals. System damage can cause large uncertain structural and parametric uncertainties. Direct adaptive compensation is to design feedback control signals such that despite uncertain failures and damage, the adaptive control system can automatically achieve desired stability and asymptotic tracking. In this talk, we will address some technical issues in adaptive failure and damage compensation, focused on aircraft flight control applications, including system modeling with failures and damage, redundant actuation, plant-model matching, system invariance under damage, error systems with faults, adaptive detection and compensation design, stability and tracking, and system performance evaluation. Adaptive compensation of rudder, aileron and elevator failures, or wing damage will be demonstrated.

Biography: Gang Tao received his B.S. degree from University of Science and Technology of China in 1982, M.S. degrees and Ph.D. degree from University of Southern California during 1984-1989. For over 25 years, he worked in the areas of adaptive control, with particular interests in adaptive control of systems with multiple inputs and multiple outputs and with nonsmooth nonlinearities and actuator failures, in stability and robustness of adaptive control systems, and in passivity characterizations of dynamic systems. During the recent years he has been working on adaptive control of uncertain systems with uncertain actuator nonlinearities, actuator failures, structural damage, and sensor uncertainties and failures, with applications to aircraft/spacecraft flight control. He published 6 books and over 300 technical papers on the related topics. He is currently an associate editor for Automatica and a subject editor for International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing, for areas of adaptive control. He is a Fellow of IEEE.