Fault-tolerant attitude computation for unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

Attitude information is essential in the control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). One way of defining attitude is through Euler angles. These angles can be determined based on the measurements of the projections of the gravity and earth magnetic fields on the three body axes of the vehicle. Twenty-five methods have been developed to compute the Euler angles and each of these methods employ a subset of the six measurements. The capability of computing the Euler angles in multiple ways provides a diversified redundancy required for fault tolerance. The proposed approach can identify the sensor failures and even separate the reference fields from the disturbances. A bank-to-turn manoeuvre of the NASA GTM UAV is used to show how to determine the correct Euler angles despite interferences by inertial acceleration.

Robust attitude fault-tolerant control for unmanned autonomous helicopter with flapping dynamics and actuator faults

“…In particular, for a medium-scale UAH, which possesses the special advantages over small-scale UAHs of long cruise, large payload, high altitude, fast speed and strong robustness and the ability to execute some special missions, such as offshore support, close fire support and material transportation, if actuator faults cannot be resolved in a timely manner, the whole UAH system may go out of control or the faults may even lead to serious property losses and catastrophic consequences. Improving the security and reliability of a UAH is greatly challenging and has crucial practical significance in designing high-quality fault-tolerant control algorithms in the aerospace industry (Caliskan and Hajiyev, 2016; Jagadish and Chang, 2011; Qian et al, 2016).…”

Unmanned Helicopter Faults Diagnosis based on Petri Nets

“…From the fault diagnosis point of view, most of the research works are focused on evaluating hardware failures located in the aircraft, i.e., sensors and actuators (Gaujens et al, 2014) (Wu et al, 2015), the proposed approach by (Jagadish and Chang, 2011) can identify the sensor failures in UAVs by mean of computing the Euler angles in multiple ways. On the other hand, few research efforts (Drozeski et al, 2005) are focus on identifying faults; seeking for a reconfiguration of the control system so as to bring the aircraft to a state of normal operation or, in the worst case, abort the mission.…”