Real-time design and simulation of an actuator failure compensation algorithm for a rocket fairing vibration reduction model

Active vibration control for a rocket fairing system requires tight timing constraints to guarantee desired system real-time performance. Actuator failures can cause performance deterioration or dysfunction of a fairing system, which needs to be effectively compensated in a timely manner. In this paper, the actuator failure compensation problem is formulated and an adaptive actuator failure compensation scheme is evaluated for a typical actuator failure model that the actuator output is stuck at some unknown values at unknown time instants. The adaptive compensation controller is implemented as a task competing with other tasks for system resources in a real-time context. The effects of timing constraints such as sampling interval and control latency are illustrated by simulation on a real-time simulator. A timing compensation scheme is implemented to compensate for the detrimental effects caused by real-time constraints. The effectiveness of timing compensation together with failure compensation is demonstrated by simulation results.