Fault-Tolerant Control for Aircraft with Structural Damage Using Sparse Online Gaussian Process Regression

Abstract

This paper presents the design of data-driven fault-tolerant control using sparse online Gaussian process regression (SOGPR) to stabilize an aircraft with left-wing damage. The structural damage causes changes in mass, moment of inertia, center of gravity, and aerodynamic coefficients. These parameter variations deteriorate the performance of model-based nonlinear control methods. Hence, Gaussian process-based nonlinear dynamic inversion (GP-NDI) is proposed to compensate for uncertainties in situations of structural damage. Unlike parametric adaptive control approaches, Gaussian process regression is a non-parametric method that does not need prior information about uncertainties. And the proposed method implements SOGPR to reduce computational time and memory by incrementally updating the mean and variance. To compensate for the error in the estimated uncertainty, a robust control input is designed. In addition, a weighted delete score is used to improve the transient response. Numerical simulation results are compared with model reference adaptive control (MRAC) and nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) to analyze a stabilizing and tracking performance in a structural damage situation.