Fault-Tolerant Control Strategies in Aerospace Actuation Systems

Aerospace actuation systems are the critical link between command signals and mechanical motion, driving flight control surfaces, landing gear, thrust vector nozzles and other safety-critical components. Failures in sensors, actuators or power supplies can jeopardise aircraft stability and mission success. Fault-tolerant control (FTC) strategies aim to detect and isolate faults swiftly, reconfigure control laws or reassign commands among redundant actuators, and maintain acceptable performance without human intervention. Approaches range from passive designs, which embed robustness to predefined fault scenarios, to active methods that integrate online fault detection and adaptive reconfiguration.

Recent developments emphasise analytical redundancy, where model-based observers or estimators compare measured signals with predictions to detect anomalies. Sliding mode controllers and extended state observers have demonstrated resilience to nonlinearities, uncertainties and unknown disturbances. Control allocation techniques leverage hardware redundancy—multiple electromechanical or electrohydrostatic actuators—to redistribute control effort when one channel degrades. Advances in computing enable data-driven and adaptive schemes that update fault estimates in real time, reducing reliance on conservative safety margins and improving overall energy efficiency.

Practical applications include fly-by-wire flight surfaces on civil and military aircraft, electrohydrostatic actuators for more-electric aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles with multirotor configurations. By combining robust estimation, intelligent reconfiguration and decentralised control allocation, modern FTC frameworks enhance reliability, support certification requirements and pave the way for more-electric and autonomous aerospace platforms.

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Fault-Tolerant Control Strategies in Aerospace Actuation Systems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in fault-tolerant control strategies in aerospace actuation systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Fault-tolerant control: Control methodology designed to detect, isolate and accommodate component failures, ensuring continued operation within acceptable performance bounds.

Analytical redundancy: Model-based technique that compares real-time measurements with predicted behaviour to detect discrepancies indicative of faults.

Integral sliding mode control: Robust control approach combining sliding mode action with integral terms to handle uncertainties and ensure fast fault accommodation.

Adaptive fault estimation: Algorithmic process that dynamically identifies the magnitude and nature of sensor or actuator faults during system operation.

Control allocation: Strategy for distributing control commands among multiple redundant actuators to achieve desired performance and compensate for failed or degraded units.

References

1. Linear Extended State Observer-Based Motion Synchronization Control for Hybrid Actuation System of More Electric Aircraft. Sensors (2017).
2. A Robust Sensor and Actuator Fault Tolerant Control Scheme for Nonlinear System. IEEE Access (2021).
3. An integral sliding mode fault tolerant control for a class of non‐linear Lipschitz systems. IET Control Theory and Applications (2020).
4. Artificial Immune Systems: An Overview for Faulting Actuators. Actuators (2019).