Design and Experimental Validation of Robust Self-Scheduled Fault-Tolerant Control Laws for a Multicopter UAV

In recent years, multicopter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been widely used in many commercial and military applications. Due to the increasing requirement for high autonomy and safety, UAVs should possess a fault-tolerant ability to accommodate malfunctions during flight. This article presents two fault-tolerant control (FTC) designs for a multicopter UAV subject to actuator faults. The proposed FTC approach is based on gain-scheduling (GS) control in the framework of structured H-infinity synthesis. The scheduled gains of the first controller are parameterized as polynomial functions of the loss of actuator effectiveness, given by an appropriate fault detection and diagnosis system. In order to facilitate the tuning process, the second controller uses the loss of virtual control effectiveness as the GS variable. Experimental results performed on an hexacopter UAV show the effectiveness and the robustness of these methods subject to multiple critical actuator faults.