An adaptive reset control system for flight safety in the presence of actuator anomalies

This paper addresses the effect of actuator anomalies on flight control design, with particular emphasis on loss of effectiveness and actuator saturation. An adaptive controller with an integral action and a resetting strategy is proposed to address the actuator anomalies.We show that the stability of the closed-loop system can be guaranteed and that the controller allows a graceful degradation of the system performance in the presence of saturation. Simulations of a nonlinear transport aircraft-model are carried out to validate the proposed adaptive controller. The results show that the adaptive reset controller leads to a significantly improved performance compared to a non-adaptive controller.