Fault tolerant control of a quadrotor using L-1 adaptive control

Purpose – The growing use of small unmanned rotorcraft in civilian applications means that safe operation is increasingly important. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the fault tolerant properties to faults in the actuators of an L1 adaptive controller for a quadrotor vehicle. Design/methodology/approach – L1 adaptive control provides fast adaptation along with decoupling between adaptation and robustness. This makes the approach a suitable candidate for fault tolerant control of quadrotor and other multirotor vehicles. In the paper, the design of an L1 adaptive controller is presented. The controller is compared to a fixed-gain LQR controller. Findings – The L1 adaptive controller is shown to have improved performance when subject to actuator faults, and a higher range of actuator fault tolerance. Research limitations/implications – The control scheme is tested in simulation of a simple model that ignores aerodynamic and gyroscopic effects. Hence for further work, testing with a more complete model is recommended followed by implementation on an actual platform and flight test. The effect of sensor noise should also be considered along with investigation into the influence of wind disturbances and tolerance to sensor failures. Furthermore, quadrotors cannot tolerate total failure of a rotor without loss of control of one of the degrees of freedom, this aspect requires further investigation. Practical implications – Applying the L1 adaptive controller to a hexrotor or octorotor would increase the reliability of such vehicles without recourse to methods that require fault detection schemes and control reallocation as well as providing tolerance to a total loss of a rotor. Social implications – In order for quadrotors and other similar unmanned air vehicles to undertake many proposed roles, a high level of safety is required. Hence the controllers should be fault tolerant. Originality/value – Fault tolerance to partial actuator/effector faults is demonstrated using an L1 adaptive controller

Experimental Flight Testing of an Adaptive Autopilot with Parameter Drift Mitigation

This paper modifies an adaptive multicopter autopilot to mitigate instabilities caused by adaptive parameter drift and presents simulation and experimental results to validate the modified autopilot. The modified adaptive controller is obtained by including a static nonlinearity in the adaptive loop, updated by the retrospective cost adaptive control algorithm. It is shown in simulation and physical test experiments that the adaptive autopilot with proposed modifications can continually improve the fixed-gain autopilot as well as prevent the drift of the adaptive parameters, thus improving the robustness of the adaptive autopilot.Comment: 6 pages, 16 figures, submitted to IROS 202

Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Formation Control for Quadrotors with Actuator Faults

In this paper, we investigate the fault-tolerant formation control of a group of quadrotor aircrafts with a leader. Continuous fault-tolerant formation control protocol is constructed by using adaptive updating mechanism and boundary layer theory to compensate actuator fault. Results show that the desired formation pattern and trajectory under actuator fault can be achieved using the proposed fault-tolerant formation control. A simulation is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the method

Navigation and control based on integral-uncertainty observer for unmanned jet aircraft

A nonlinear integral-uncertainty observer is presented, which can estimate the integral of measurement output signal and the uncertainty in system, synchronously. In order to be satisfied with the existing hardware computational environments and to select the parameters more easily, a simplified linear version of the nonlinear integral-uncertainty observer is also developed. The effectiveness of the proposed observers are verified through the numerical simulations and experiments: i) through the integral-uncertainty observers, the attitude angle and the uncertainties in attitude dynamics are estimated synchronously from the measurements of angular velocity, and the estimate results by the two observers are compared; ii) a control law is designed based on the observers to drive the jet aircraft to track a reference trajectory

ℒ1 adaptive control of quadrotor UAVs in case of inversion of the torque direction

This paper presents a method for fault tolerant control of quadrotor UAVs in case of inversion of the torque direction, a situation that might occur due to structural, hardware or software issues. The proposed design is based on multiple-model ℒ1 adaptive control. The controller is composed of a nominal reference model and a set of degraded reference models. The nominal model is that with desired dynamics that are optimal regarding some specific criteria. In a degraded model, the performance criteria are reduced. It is designed to ensure system robustness in the presence of critical failures. The controller is tested in simulations and it is shown that the multiple model ℒ1 adaptive controller stabilizes the system in case of inversion of the control input, while the ℒ1 adaptive controller with a single nominal model fails

Implementation and Validation of Gaussian Process Model Reference Adaptive Control for Fixed Wing Unmanned Aerial Systems

Over the last couple of decades, rapid development of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) has been observed. UAS are becoming an integral part of various industries such as agriculture, communications, defense, first response and geophysical surveys. This wide range of applications over different industries demand a number of mission specific vehicle platforms. The platforms must be reliable in all environments as well as in the presence of various uncertainties. Presently, the UAS that are flown autonomously rely on extensive manual tuning of control parameters. The control parameters are platform specific, hence transferring the controllers from one platform to another, is time consuming and requires extensive testing. A detailed approach to the implementation of an adaptive, platform independent controller, which leverages Bayesian Non-parametric (GP-MRAC) approach towards the adaptive control is presented. A Hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) framework is integrated to test the developed autopilot system. Extensive testing in the HITL environment was done and results from HITL tests and real world flight test results are presented. The results indicates that GP-MRAC outperforms the baseline PID controller and the RBF-NN MRAC from the HITL.Mechanical & Aerospace Engineerin

Dynamics estimator based robust fault-tolerant control for VTOL UAVs trajectory tracking

This paper investigates the control issue of the trajectory tracking of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of partial propeller fault and external disturbance. In particular, a robust passive fault-tolerant control strategy is proposed by introducing a first-order filter based dynamics estimator. First, a bounded force command is exploited by employing a new smooth saturation function in the output of the estimator. A sufficient condition in terms of a specified parameter selection criteria is provided to ensure the nonsingularity extraction of the command attitude. Then, a torque command is applied to the attitude loop tracking. Since there is merely one filter parameter involved in the dynamics estimator, the practical implementation and parameter tuning can be significantly simplified. Stability analysis indicates that the proposed control strategy guarantees the semi-globally ultimately bounded tracking of VTOL UAVs subject to partial propeller fault and external disturbance. Simulation and experiment results with comparison examples are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy achieves the trajectory tracking with a good performance (mean deviation 0.0074 m and standard deviation 0.1202 m) in the presence of 35% propeller fault and 4 m/s persistent wind disturbance