A Review on Recent Development of Multirotor UAV Fault-Tolerant Control Systems

The past decades have witnessed an increase in the use of multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This has led the way to the development of fault-tolerant control algorithms to service the different applications provided by these UAVs in different situations and circumstances. This paper is concerned with theoretical approaches and real practices for Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) and Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) of multirotor UAVs, namely quadrotors, hexarotors and octorotors. The topic is addressed by identifying the most significant faults and failures on these vehicles, the different FDD and FTC architectures as well as the experimental real-time validations available in the published literature. A review of some challenges in the general area of multirotor UAV fault-tolerant control design is further concluded.