Reliable control of a twin rotor MIMO system using actuator health monitoring

This paper presents a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach that permits distributing the control effort among actuators using health actuator information and exploiting some relations between control effort and actuator degradation. Tuning the control input weighting factors in the MPC cost function or imposing degradation constraints enable ensuring that the degradation will remain below a safety threshold until a maintenance intervention can be carried out. To assess the performance of the proposed approach a two degree of freedom helicopter simulator is used.