Active Fault-Tolerant Control applied to a hexacopter under propulsion system failures

Abstract

This work presents a new Active Fault-Tolerant Control (AFTC) method to maintain the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) stable and controllable even under a total fault up to one propulsion system actions. The proposed approach is based on the control system re-configuration of the remaining propellers. As the system is no longer controllable in all six degrees of freedom, one dimension should be abandoned. In this case, the control of yaw dynamics was chosen to be ignored because less crash risk is introduced. Than the remaining variables became controllable leading the aircraft to safely land and without shortcoming.