On the Effect of Faults in Vibration Control of Fairing Structures

Sensor-actuator networks are increasingly being used in distributed control applications. The cost of sensors and actuators is dropping substantially and hence control by a large number of these components is now feasible. One such application is the damping of acoustic and structural vibration associated with the launch of a rocket. Reliability in the presence of faults is critical for such mission systems. These faults could be broken components, insecure or compromised components offering erroneous data to the control. The network itself could add unpredictable delays and data drop outs that could affect the control in potentially unanticipated ways. In this paper, we consider the Boeing Open Experimental Platform fairing control application for acoustic and structural vibration damping and study the effect of component level and network level faults. We identify several scenarios under which control performance is intolerable. This leads us to design an alternative control scheme. We design the application using a purely local on-off control scheme and compare its performance with that of the original system.