Emergency Control Strategy of a Reconfigurable Quadrotor with Total Loss of One Rotor

Abstract

In this paper, an emergency control strategy is developed for a new reconfigurable quadrotor with foldable rotor arms to deal with a total loss of one of its rotors. The proposed strategy allows to adapt the configuration of the quadrotor when severe fault is occurred in one rotor. The reconfigurable quadcopter changes its shape by folding the two adjacent rotor arms to the damaged one and performs as a trirotor. Since the shape transformation induces a variation of vehicle's center of gravity which results variations of the inertia and the control matrix, an emergency sliding mode controller is designed based on control allocation matrix, where the control efforts are redistributed among healthy actuators in the resulting configuration of the quadrotor. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy is successful in controlling the damaged quadrotor until achieving its trajectory.