Guaranteed resilience of autonomous systems to partial loss of control authority over actuators

After docking to the International Space Station (ISS), the Nauka module suffered a software error causing its thrusters to misfire. In turn, these uncontrolled thrusters rotated the whole space station by 540° before being counteracted by other thrusters of the ISS. Motivated by such a scenario, this thesis investigates the guaranteed resilience of autonomous systems to a similar class of malfunctions called partial loss of control authority over actuators. These malfunctions are characterized by actuators producing uncontrolled and undesirable outputs instead of following the controller’s commands. A loss of control authority can be caused, for instance, by a software bug as in the ISS example or by an adversarial takeover of some actuators of the system. In this setting, we investigate the malfunctioning system’s remaining capabilities to complete its mission in terms of resilient reachability and resilient trajectory tracking. We also quantify the resilience of linear systems by comparing the reachability performance of the nominal dynamics with that of the worst-case malfunctioning dynamics. We extend our resilience investigation to systems further inflicted with actuation delays preventing an immediate cancellation of the undesirable outputs. We illustrate our theory on a wide range of applications including an octocopter, a fighter jet model, and an orbital inspection mission.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Aerospace Engineering

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Bouvier, Jean-Baptiste

Contributors dc:contributor

• Ornik, Melkior
• Woollands, Robyn
• Langbort, Cedric
• Liberzon, Daniel

• Resilience
• Autonomous Systems
• Control Theory

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Jean-Baptiste Bouvier

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120225

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F120225