Optimized reconfigurable modular flight control design using swarm intelligence

This paper presents an optimized reconfigurable control design methodology by separating control commands distribution task from flight controller for different types of fault handling. The proposed strategy improves the flight control performance in normal and fault situations. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) based multi-input multi-output (MIMO) linear quadratic regulator (LQR) is used to produce virtual command signals. A modified weighted pseudo-inverse (WPI) based cascaded reallocation technique is employed for effective implementation of commands to redundant control surfaces in a realistic nonlinear aircraft benchmark model. Control surface fault modelling is performed for the evaluation of optimized reconfiguration based modular flight control strategy. Simulation results show that acceptable fault tolerant control (FTC) performance can be achieved by using swarm intelligence based optimization technique for modular control design.