Motor Failure Detection in FPGA-Based Fault-Tolerant Quadcopters

Quadcopters have recently become a very important component in search and rescue missions. This paper proposes solutions to several problems facing quadcopters in such missions. First, a fault-tolerant FPGA-based architecture is developed which can recover from both soft and hard failures. It is then proven through reliability modeling that this architecture has a considerably higher lifetime than a similar architecture with no fault tolerance. Second, it is shown how to use accelerometers to detect motor faults in order to improve mission decision-making.