Fault recovery of an under-actuated quadrotor Aerial Vehicle

Miniature Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with ability to vertically take off and land (as in quadrotors) exhibit advantages and features in maneuverability that have recently gained strong interest in the research community. Reliability of control systems require robustness and fault tolerance capabilities in presence of anomalies and unexpected failures in actuators, sensors or subsystems. Development of an autonomous fault diagnosis and recovery system that can cope with these faults has attracted a lot of interest in the past several years. Particularly, for small aerial vehicles due to hardware redundancy limitations design of a reliable control system plays an important role in ensuring acceptable and efficient performance. In this paper, an autonomous fault recovery scheme is proposed in response to actuator faults in an under-actuated quadrotor aerial vehicle. A self-recovery mechanism, which extends the capabilities of the quadrotor system to operate under the presence of faults is proposed. The solution developed takes into account the management of the control authority by incorporating the post-fault model of the actuator.