Unscented Kalman Filter For Aircraft Sensor Fault Detection

To prevent the critical situation due to the fault in the aircraft sensor system, the fault tolerant system with triple or quadruple redundancy can be made. However, if the faults are occurred in two or more than sensors simultaneously, the conventional fault detection process, such as cross-channel monitoring, may give the wrong fault alarm. For this case, we can detect the fault by estimating the state vector based on the system dynamics model, which is nonlinear for aircraft. In this paper, we propose the unscented Kalman filter to estimate the nonlinear state vector. This filter utilizes the so-called unscented transformation of sigma points featured the statistical characteristics of the random variable. For verification, we perform the simulations for F-16 aircraft with accelerometers, gyros, GPS and air data system.