Reconfigurable Flight Control System Design Using Sliding Mode Based Model Following Control Scheme

In this paper, a reconfigurable flight control system is designed by applying the sliding mode control scheme. The sliding mode control method is a nonlinear control method which has been widely used because of its merits such as robustness and flexibility. In the sliding mode controller design, the signum function is usually included, but it causes the undesirable chattering problem. The chattering phenomenon can be avoided by using the saturation function instead of signum function. However, the boundary layer of the sliding surface should be carefully treated because of the use of the saturation function. In contrast to the conventional approaches, the thickness of the boundary layer of our approach does not need to be small. The reachability to the boundary layer is guaranteed by the sliding mode controller. The fault detection and isolation process is operated based on a sliding mode observer. To evaluate the reconfiguration performance, a numerical simulation using six degree-of-freedom aircraft dynamics is performed.