Performance enhancement of a multiple model adaptive estimator

We describe performance improvement techniques for a multiple model adaptive estimator (MMAE) used to detect and identify control surface and sensor failures on an unmanned flight vehicle. Initially failure identification was accomplished within 4 s of onset, but by removing the “β dominance” effects, bounding the hypothesis conditional probabilities, retuning the Kalman filters, increasing the penalty for measurement residuals, decreasing the probability smoothing, and increasing residual propagation, the identification time was reduced to 2 s