Drone Resilient Control Against Actuator Failures and Wind Gusts

Drones are expected to be exposed to different disturbances such as actuator failures or wind gusts, especially when operating outdoors. This can heavily affect the drone’s mission and may even cause a crash. Considering these situations, a robust and resilient control has to be implemented in the drone to enable wind rejection and operate with faulty actuators de-creasing crash chances. In this paper, quadcopter simulations are performed while introducing actuator failures and under wind gusts. Two control approaches are proposed: Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) and Sliding Mode Controle (SMC). Simulation results show a slight advantage for the sliding mode controller over the linear quadratic regulator in responding to actuator failures and wind gusts. However, both strategies were able to prevent the quadcopter from malfunction.