Reliable Flight Control: Gravity-Compensation-First Principle

Safety is always the priority in aviation. However, current state-of-the-art passive fault-tolerant control is too conservative to use; current state-of-the-art active fault-tolerant control requires time to perform fault detection and diagnosis, and control switching. But it may be later to recover impaired aircraft. Most designs depend on failures determined as a priori and cannot deal with fault, causing the original system's state to be uncontrollable. However, experienced human pilots can save a serve impaired aircraft as far as they can. Motivated by this, this paper develops a principle to try to explain human pilot behavior behind, coined the gravity-compensation-first principle. This further supports reliable flight control for aircraft such as quadcopters and tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicles.