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CEAS EuroGNC 2022

Incremental Passive Fault-Tolerant Control for Quadrotors With up to Three Successive Rotor Failures
Yannic Beyer PhD Student, TU Braunschweig, Institute of Flight Guidance, 38108, Braunschweig, Germany.
Fabian Gücker PhD Student, TU Braunschweig, Institute of Flight Guidance, 38108, Braunschweig, Germany.
Eike Bremers Master Student, TU Braunschweig, Institute of Flight Guidance, 38108, Braunschweig, Germany.
Meiko Steen Senior Researcher, TU Braunschweig, Institute of Flight Guidance, 38108, Braunschweig, Germany.
Peter Hecker Professor, TU Braunschweig, Institute of Flight Guidance, 38108, Braunschweig, Germany.
Abstract:
Fault-tolerant control (FTC) can increase the safety of drones, such as quadrotors. It has been known for eight years that the position of quadrotors can still be controlled in case of up to three rotor failures by spinning the quadrotor about an average thrust direction. It has also been shown that the robust incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) control concept can be used to transition the quadrotor to the desired state in case a of single rotor failure or two opposing rotor failures. However, the previous concepts use active FTC as they rely on fault detection and isolation. In this paper, up to three rotor failures of quadrotors are investigated using a passive FTC appraoch based on INDI and control allocation. Simulation results show that a single rotor failure or two opposing rotor failures can be compensated but three simultaneous rotor failures lead to a crash. Nevertheless, if the third rotor fails with some time delay, the failure can be compensated since the quadrotor has already started spinning about an average thrust direction before. The results are validated outdoor with a real quadrotor equipped with an inertial measurement unit and a satellite navigation device. Here, it must be ensured that the state estimator remains stable even if the inertial measurement unit spins rapidly and permanently. Furthermore, it can happen with small quadrotors that the occurring rotational speed exceeds the maximum measurable rotational speed of the gyro sensors, which leads to a crash.
Keywords: Quadrotor; Rotor Failure; Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion; Control Allocation; Passive Fault-Tolerant Control
 View PDF CEAS-GNC-2022-067


Yannic Beyer, Fabian Gücker, Eike Bremers, Meiko Steen, Peter Hecker: Incremental Passive Fault-Tolerant Control for Quadrotors With up to Three Successive Rotor Failures. Proceedings of the 2022 CEAS EuroGNC conference. Berlin, Germany. May 2022. CEAS-GNC-2022-067.
BibTeX entry:

@Incollection{CEAS-GNC-2022-067,
    authors = {Beyer, Yannic and Gücker, Fabian and Bremers, Eike and Steen, Meiko and Hecker, Peter},
    title = {Incremental Passive Fault-Tolerant Control for Quadrotors With up to Three Successive Rotor Failures},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2022 {CEAS EuroGNC} conference},
    address = {Berlin, Germany},
    month = may,
    year = {2022},
    note = {CEAS-GNC-2022-067}
}