Vibration suppression and fault-tolerant control of an aerial refueling hose with multiple actuators

In this paper, we propose an adaptive fault-tolerant boundary vibration control approach for the flexible aerial refueling hose with variable length, variable speed, and multiple actuators. A distributed parameter system (DPS) is utilized to represent the dynamic behavior of the flexible refueling hose more precisely and accurately. Based on the established DPS model, we present a boundary vibration controller to suppress the vibration of the flexible refueling hose. In the controller, fault-tolerant control with multiple actuators is considered to tackle the failure issues, and both multiplicative and additive failures are discussed in the fault situation. Then, by the Lyapunov direct method, we prove that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed under the proposed control approach. Numerical examples are presented to support the theoretical derivation.