Fault tolerant controller design for component faults of a small scale unmanned aerial vehicle

Abstract

In this paper additive fault detection and isolation method coupled with fault tolerant control architecture are developed in order to deal with component faults for a rotorcraft based unmanned aerial vehicle (RUAV). The failure considered is malfunction with internal components of the helicopter which occurs during the maneuvers: rotor angular rate variations, etc. These faults lead from trivial to catastrophic damage of the system. The proposed fault detection and reconfiguration control is based on a parameter estimation approach which drives a reconfigurable control system (RCS) build with the Pseudo-inverse method. The complete setup is implemented under Hardware-in-the-loop-simulation (HILS). The PC104 board with QNX RTOS platform is used for simulation. Simulation results illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.