Sensor fault-tolerant control of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle

This article handles the issue of fault-tolerant control of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the existence of sensor faults. A general non-linear model of the quadrotor is presented. Several non-linear Kalman filters namely, the extended Kalman filter, the unscented Kalman filter and the cubature Kalman filter (CKF) are utilized to estimate the states of the quadrotor and to compare the estimation performances. Some flight scenarios are simulated, and the simulation results show that the CKF has the smallest estimation error as expected in theory. Control of the quadrotor heavily depends on the measured values received from sensors. Therefore, the control system requires fault-free sensors. However, small quadrotors and UAVs are mostly equipped with low-cost and low-quality sensors, and hence, they may fail to indicate correct measurement values. If the sensors are faulty, then the control system itself should be actively tolerant to sensor faults. Measurements of these kinds of sensors suffer from bias and external noise due to temperature variations, vibration and other external conditions. Since the bias is one of the very common faults in these sensors, a sensor bias is taken into consideration as a fault and occurs abruptly at a certain time and continues throughout the considered scenarios. By using the residual signals generated by the non-linear filters, sensor faults are detected and isolated. Then, two different methods are proposed for removing the effects of faults and achieving active fault-tolerant control. The effectiveness of the presented two techniques is shown in the simulations.