Active fault-tolerant control for quadrotors subjected to a complete rotor failure

This paper deals with the active fault-tolerant control for quadrotors which are subjected to a total rotor failure. Previous studies assume that the fault has been detected and isolated and then design a fault-tolerant controller. The present paper proposes a complete active fault-tolerant control system which copes with not only fault detection and isolation but also fault-tolerant control. A novel and efficient fault detection and isolation approach is proposed for the total rotor failure case. An incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion approach is introduced to design the fault-tolerant controller for the quadrotor in the presence of the fault. The complete active fault-tolerant control system enables the quadrotor to achieve any position even after the complete loss of one rotor.