Intelligent adaptive control of a Tailless Advanced Fighter Aircraft (TAFA) in the presence of wing damage

In this paper we propose an intelligent adaptive reconfigurable control scheme for a Tailless Advanced Fighter Aircraft (TAFA) in the presence of wing damage. The scheme consists of failure detection using multiple observers, multiple reference models for changing the desired performance online in the case of damage, on-line estimation of the percentage-of-damage parameter, and the corresponding adaptive reconfigurable controller augmented with an output error feedback term. The overall scheme results in fast and accurate failure detection and identification and control reconfiguration, and was demonstrated analytically to be stable in the sense that all signals are bounded and the output error converges to zero asymptotically even in the case of 100% wing damage. The properties of the proposed intelligent adaptive controller are evaluated through numerical simulations on a TAFA model in the presence of large noise, actuator dynamics, position and rate limits on the control effecters, and 100% wing damage, and it is shown that the proposed approach results in excellent overall performance.