Hexarotor Fault Tolerant Control Using a Bank of Disturbance Observers

This paper proposes the design of an actuator fault tolerant control scheme for a hexagon shaped multirotor. The approach relies on the so called disturbance observer based control. First, a fault isolation module, based on a bank of observers, is designed in order to locate a fault in the over actuated multirotor system. Then, a set of disturbance observers provides the fault estimation, leading to an autoconfigurable switching scheme. Finally, the fault estimation is used at the control level to mitigate the effects of the fault. The design is discussed for up two possible simultaneous faults, and simulation results confirm that the designed scheme can provide fault tolerant capabilities to a hexarotor system.