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Recently, a consistent push towards a “more electrical” approach for drive systems in the aerospace and automotive industries has fueled interest in condition monitoring and prediction of impending electronic system failures and remaining useful life (RUL) of critical components. The ever-expanding use of the electrical actuator and power drives significantly increases the possibilities of applying reconfiguration techniques under fault condition for extended operation of electric machinery, including electrical actuators. Consequently, operation in the fault tolerant mode has a growing interest and potential wide-spread application. The modern actuator mainly consists of a brushless DC motor (BLDC) that is composed of stator winding, a permanent magnet rotor and Hall Effect sensors.

This paper presents a novel health monitoring and fault adaptive control architecture for an unmanned hexrotor helicopter. The technologies developed to achieve the described level of robust fault contingency management include; 1.) A Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) routine for maximizing the “built-in” fault tolerance that the closed loop flight control system affords, 2.) A two-stage Kalman filter scheme for real-time identification of faults that are masked by control system compensation, and 3.) A reconfigurable control allocation method which compensates for large degradations of the six main motor/rotor assemblies. The fault adaptive control system presented herein has strong robustness against small faults without the need for controller reconfiguration, and strong tolerance of large faults through adaptive accommodation of the fault source and severity.