Model Reference Adaptive Fault Tolerant Control of a Quadrotor UAV

Abstract

This paper presents some experimental results on actuator fault-tolerant control (FTC) for a quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system. The strategy is based on Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) where three di erent MRAC techniques are implemented and compared with a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) baseline controller, namely the MIT rule MRAC, the Conventional MRAC (C-MRAC) and the Modi ed MRAC (MMRAC). The main advantage of the MRAC strategy is that it does not require an explicit information about the fault location and/or amplitude and thus, a fault detection and diagnosis module is not needed to detect, isolate and identify the occurred faults. The performance of this MRAC-based FTC is tested in the presence of three types of actuator faults: loss of e ectiveness in the total thrust, loss of e ectiveness in one of the rotors and partial damage of one propeller.