Neural Network-Based Active Fault-Tolerant Control Design for Unmanned Helicopter with Additive Faults

Abstract

A novel adaptive neural network-based fault-tolerant control scheme is proposed for six degree-of-freedom nonlinear helicopter dynamic. The proposed approach can detect and mitigate actuators and sensors’ faults in real time. An adaptive observer-based on neural network (NN) and extended Kalman filter (EKF) is designed, which incorporates the helicopter’s dynamic model to detect faults in the actuators and navigation sensors. Based on the detected faults, an active fault-tolerant controller, including three loops of dynamic inversion, is designed to compensate for the occurred faults in real time. The simulation results showed that the proposed approach is able to detect and mitigate different types of faults on the helicopter actuators, and the helicopter tracks the desired trajectory without any interruption.