Autonomous guidance and control of airplanes under severe damage

This paper presents an overview of the fault tolerant control work performed at Georgia Tech. Flight test results on the Georgia Tech GT Twinstar fixed wing twin engine aircraft are presented. The algorithms presented were flight tested under different structural dam-age scenarios, including multiple actuator failures, propulsion only control, ight with 25% left wing missing, and sudden loss of 50% right wing and aileron in flight. A state de-pendent guidance logic is described that ensures the aircraft tracks feasible commands in presence of faults. The commands are used by an outerloop linear controller to generate feasible attitude commands. The innerloop attitude control can be achieved by using either a linear attitude controller or a neural network based model reference adaptive controller. The results establish the feasibility of using control methods to ensure safe autonomous flight in presence of severe faults for a transport category aircraft.