ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

This paper deals with an advanced Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) strategy for re-entry flight that guarantees robustness against sensors failures, in terms of degradation of measurements accuracy. The proposed strategy takes advantage of the estimated accuracies of navigation measurements (provided by a Health monitoring function) to reconfigure the control laws and on-line change the closed-loop system behavior. In particular, the authors propose flight control laws based on a direct Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) scheme with an on-line adjustment of the reference model in order to react to an abrupt change of measurements accuracy. The validity of the proposed approach has been shown by means of some numerical analyses where in-flight sensor failures are simulated.