A Discrete-Time Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Control Allocation Schemes for Overactuated Vehicles

Fault-tolerant control systems are paramount for autonomously guided vehicles. The actuator redundancy concept is widely used as a practical approach in many physical systems. In such systems, the control allocator is responsible to distribute the control effort among redundant actuators and it results an increased system reliability and flexibility even in faulty scenarios. In this work, the idea of using a control allocation scheme to distribute the control effort among healthy actuators without affecting the nominal control law is presented. We proposed an enhanced discrete-time adaptive control allocation algorithm for overactuated systems. The proposed method handles actuators’ loss of effectiveness and thruster stuck situations under both input saturation and limitations on the input rate of change. We evaluate the applicability of our method by simulating several vehicles on path-following problems.