An Intelligent Fault Detection Framework for FW-UAV Based on Hybrid Deep Domain Adaptation Networks and the Hampel Filter

Fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (FW-UAVs) play an essential role in many fields, but the faults of FW-UAV components lead to severe accidents frequently; so, there is a need to continuously explore more intelligent fault detection methods to improve the safety and reliability of FW-UAVs. Deep learning provides advanced solution ideas for future UAV fault detection, but the current lack of UAV monitoring data limits the advantages of deep learning in UAV fault detection, which are both a challenge and an opportunity. In this paper, we mainly consider the data availability of deep learning under various practical flight conditions of FW-UAVs and propose a fault detection framework based on hybrid deep domain adaptation BiLSTM networks and the Hampel filter (HDBNH), the main purpose of which is to learn the knowledge of acquired data for detecting FW-UAV faults in other unknown operating conditions. HDBNH consists of three modules: feature extractor, domain adaptor, and fault detector. The feature extractor is two BiLSTM networks constructed to extract the past and future state features from the time-series flight data. The discrepancy of feature distribution between different domains is effectively reduced in the domain adaptor by a hybrid adversarial and the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) domain adaptation method. The fault detector consists of a fault classification module and a Hampel filter. According to the continuous and dynamic characteristics of FW-UAV state changes, the Hampel filter is used to detect and correct the predicted values of the fault classification module. Meanwhile, a new state sample preparation strategy is proposed to support the work of HDBNH better. Finally, the effectiveness of HDBNH is confirmed by conducting extensive experiments in real FW-UAV flight data.