Prognostics Enhanced Reconfigurable Control of Electro-Mechanical Actuators

They must operate reliably and accurately in order for the vehicle / process to complete successfully its designated mission. Incipient actuator failure conditions may severely endanger the operational integrity of the vehicle / process and compromise its mission.

The ability to maintain a stable and credible operation, even in the presence of incipient failures, is of paramount importance to accomplish “must achieve” mission objectives. This paper introduces a novel methodology for the fault-tolerant design of critical subsystems, such as an ElectroMechanical Actuator (EMA), that takes advantage of on-line, real-time estimates of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) or Time-to-Failure (TTF) of a failing component and reconfigures the available control authority by trading off system performance with control activity.