Generalized fault recovery of an under-actuated quadrotor aerial vehicle

Development of an autonomous fault diagnosis and recovery system for unmanned aerial vehicles has recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community. Design of a reliable control system that can cope with faults and anomalies plays an important role in ensuring efficient performance of small aerial vehicles due to hardware redundancy limitations. In this paper, an autonomous fault recovery scheme is proposed in response to multiple actuator faults in an under-actuated quadrotor aerial vehicle. Such a self-recovery mechanism extends the capabilities of the quadrotor system to operate under presence of multiple faults. The developed solution considers a control authority management by incorporating the actuator post-fault model. Simulation results for a quadrotor that is subject to various levels of loss-of-effectiveness faults in multiple control channels are presented to demonstrate the performance of our proposed approach.