Application of reconfigurable flight control techniques to reduce life cycle costs for unmanned orbital vehicles

Currently, manned orbital vehicles have flight control systems which achieve required redundancy using several paths of hardware simultaneously performing the same task. For orbital vehicles designed to be unmanned, the level of hardware redundancy can be reduced thereby lowering vehicle life cycle costs.;Overall reliability can be increased by supplementing hardware redundancy with software implemented in the vehicle's onboard computers. Algorithms are developed which will detect and isolate various flight control sensor and thruster failures for a generic unmanned orbital transfer vehicle. These software algorithms employ Kalman filtering techniques along with sensor data in a simulation to reconfigure the vehicle's flight control system subsequent to a failure.;The algorithms developed in this report work well for the generic sensors, thrusters, and vehicle modelled in the simulation. Actual implementation of the algorithms in conjunction with real hardware will change due to the different dynamic characteristics of the hardware to be used.