Hexacopter fault tolerant actuator allocation analysis for optimal thrust

Recently, it was shown that an hexagon shaped hexarotor vehicle with tilted rotors, is capable of fault tolerant attitude and altitude control. In this work, we propose a strategy to select the signals commanded to each rotor in order to achieve a desired torque and vertical force. The proposed strategy is optimal in the sense that minimizes the maximum force exerted by the rotors. A comparison with the commonly used strategy based upon the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse is carried out. It is shown that, with the optimal strategy proposed here, maneuverability is improved, because the new method takes into account the actuators constraints. Although the optimal strategy is computationally more demanding than the classical method, the additional computational burden is not significant when both strategies are compared in a real application. To show this, both algorithms were programmed in an autopilot based on an ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, and the experimental results are presented.