Experimental evaluation of an active fault-tolerant control scheme for multirotor UAVs

This paper presents experimental results that have been obtained by applying an active fault-tolerant control (FTC) framework to multirotor UAVs subject to actuator failures. The proposed fault-tolerant control scheme combines a bank of observers for diagnosis with the concept of the virtual actuator for control reconfiguration. Therefore, an evaluation method for fault detection and isolation is presented, which guarantees that the diagnosis result is always adequate for control reconfiguration. The experiments with a hovering multirotor UAV subject to a rotor failure validate the applicability of the proposed FTC scheme under real-time constraints and in the presence of natural uncertainties, measurement noise and process disturbances.