Fault-Tolerant Control of Multirotor UAVs by Control Variable Elimination

This article presents to develop a fault-tolerant control (FTC) to cope with defective thrust systems in multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Faults can occur for a number of reasons in flight, including defective motor performance and damaged propellers. The faults deform both the thrust and torque outputs that could result in the UAV crashing and causing secondary accidents. The FTC method in the article is developed to reconfigure thrust systems using the optimal control when significant degrees of failure occur in a number of defective motors. Orientation control could be abandoned to maintain the controllability of altitude when the control output loss cannot be compensated for because of motor saturation. Specifically, yaw motion control is sacrificed, resulting in a rapid rotation and divergence of position control. The divergence can be resolved by a feed forward control loop on the roll and pitch angles. Both simulations and experiments are implemented to demonstrate the performance of the FTC. The results indicate that the proposed FTC can be implemented to minimize accidents from failures of main thrust systems.