Fault Diagnosis and Fault-Tolerant Control of an Octorotor UAV using motors speeds measurements

Abstract

This paper presents an active fault-tolerant control strategy (AFTCS) for an octorotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) regarding several motors failures or rotors damages. A complete AFTC architecture including error detection, fault isolation and system recovery is presented. The diagnosis system is based on the motors speeds and currents measurements. Once the motor failure or the rotor loss is diagnosed, a recovery algorithm is applied. It uses the pseudo-inverse control allocation approach to redistribute the control efforts among the healthy actuators. This architecture is validated in real flights.