Multiplicative Fault Tolerant Controller Design for Sensor Faults of a Small Scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

Fault tolerant control systems for rotorcraft based unmanned aerial vehicles (RUAV) have been actively investigated during recent years. Control in trajectory derivations and path following process is highly dependable on sensors and actuators of RUAV. The minor failure can degrade the stability of the vehicle and might lead to uncontrollable system. Therefore the efficient mechanism should be capable of identifying the failure and proceed accordingly to maintain the stability of  system. In this paper multiplicative fault detection and isolation method coupled with fault tolerant control architecture are developed in order to deal with multiplicative fault for a rotorcraft based unmanned aerial vehicle (RUAV). The failure considered is malfunction with different sensors of the helicopter which occurs during the maneuvers: failure of IMU sensor, GPS sensor, etc. The proposed fault detection and reconfiguration control is based on parameter estimation approach which drives a reconfigurable control system (RCS). The diagnostic reasoning approach has been utilized to isolate the faulty sensors. The complete setup is implemented under Hardware-in-theloop-simulation (HILS). The PC104 board with QNX RTOS platform is used for simulation. Simulation results illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.