Development of a high redundancy actuation software demonstrator

The High Redundancy Actuation (HRA) project investigates the use of a relatively high number of small actuation elements, assembled in series and parallel in order to form a single actuator which has intrinsic fault tolerance. Experimental hardware HRAs have been developed in order to validate and demonstrate the general principles of HRA and the efficacy of various passive and active fault tolerant control approaches. However, the number of actuation elements within these demonstrators is limited due to practical constraints. Hence, a software demonstrator that allows visual illustration of the operation and control of a wider range of HRA configurations and sizes has been developed in the Matlab/Simulink environment. Realtime simulation, animation, fault injection, health monitoring and control reconfiguration are achieved in the demonstrator through combination of the Simulink and Stateflow environment with Matlab's GUI and plotting capabilities.