Fault‐tolerant adaptive control allocation schemes for overactuated systems

This paper presents a fault‐tolerant adaptive control allocation scheme for overactuated systems subject to loss of effectiveness actuator faults. The main idea is to use an ‘ ad hoc ’ online parameters estimator, coupled with a control allocation algorithm, in order to perform online control reconfiguration whenever necessary. Time‐windowed and recursive versions of the algorithm are proposed for nonlinear discrete‐time systems and their properties analyzed. Two final examples have been considered to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The first considers a simple linear system with redundant actuators and it is mainly used to exemplify the main properties and potentialities of the scheme. In the second, a realistic marine vessel scenario under propeller and thruster faults is treated in full details. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.