Sliding Mode Fault-Tolerant Control for Modular Reconfigurable Flight Arrays

This paper presents a sliding mode fault-tolerant control strategy for Modular Reconfigurable Flight Arrays (MRFAs) to address actuator failures in over-actuated configurations. By employing the parallel axis theorem, the dynamic model of the MRFAs is derived to improve modeling accuracy across various reconfigurable configurations. The proposed approach combines a sliding mode controller with control allocation techniques to ensure stable trajectory tracking under both nominal conditions and partial motor faults or failures. Moreover, this method does not require reconfiguration of the primary baseline controller and can handle at least half of the actuator failures when the system has eight or more actuators. Simulation results validate the robustness and stability of the designed sliding mode controller within the MRFAs under three different scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.