Fault-tolerant flight control and guidance systems: practical methods for small unmanned aerial vehicles

Guillaume J.J. Ducard (auth.)9781848825604, 1848825609

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer an incomparable means of gathering intelligence and carrying out missions without needing an onboard human pilot. The benefits are considerable in terms of cost, efficiency, and reduced pilot risk.

In order to complete a mission efficiently and with a high level of safety and security, the following key design points must be met:

• the flight control system must be robust against the aircraft’s model uncertainties and external disturbances;

• an efficient fault detection and isolation (FDI) system should be capable of monitoring the health of the aircraft; and

• the flight control and guidance system should be reconfigurable depending on actuator fault occurrence or aircraft damage, and should be able to avoid obstacles.

Fault-tolerant Flight Control and Guidance Systems addresses all of these aspects with a practical approach following three main requirements: being applicable in real-time; highly computationally efficient; and modular. The text provides:

• an overview of fault-tolerant flight control techniques;

• the necessary equations for the modeling of small UAVs;

• a complete nonlinear FDI system based on extended Kalman filters; and

• a nonlinear flight control and guidance system.

The book is written in a didactic style with many figures and diagrams making it suitable not only for academic researchers and practicing engineers but also graduate students working in the fields of fault detection techniques and the automatic control of UAVs.

Table of contents :
Front Matter….Pages i-xxi
Introduction….Pages 1-2
Review….Pages 3-26
Nonlinear Aircraft Model….Pages 27-41
Nonlinear Fault Detection and Isolation System….Pages 43-88
Control Allocation….Pages 89-106
Nonlinear Control Design….Pages 107-120
Autopilot for the Longitudinal Motion….Pages 121-174
Autopilot for the Lateral Motion….Pages 175-200
Reconfigurable Guidance System….Pages 201-228
Evaluation of the Reduction in the Performance of a UAV….Pages 229-240
Conclusions and Outlook….Pages 241-244
Back Matter….Pages 245-267