Unmanned Helicopter Faults Diagnosis based on Petri Nets

Abstract

This work presents a Fault Diagnosis application based on Petri Nets (PN) applied to a small unmanned helicopter. The first step of the research is the construction of the model and diagnoser for the Helicopter by using PN. A Data Acquisition System (DAQ) has been designed and built for providing the PN Diagnoser with data during the flights. Missions have been conducted with the aircraft configured to fly in both normal and fault operation. Thus, several common faults were intentionally generated during the test flights. This application allows the operator to perform the aerial vehicle health monitoring in order to prevent major damages in case of accident. Vehicle variables are monitored and thresholds adequate for the UAV defined. A summary of the validation results obtained during real flight tests are also included. An extensive use of this tool would allow improving preventive maintenance protocols for UAVs and establishing recommendations in regulations. UAVs accidents involve not only high economic cost but also serious restrictions for performing flights over populated areas. This work integrates Fault Diagnosis from theoretical and practical point of view. The use of the diagnoser by using Petri Nets is considered as novel approach.

Intermittent fault diagnosability of discrete event systems: an overview of automaton-based approaches

“…This approach has been recently extended to deal with intermittent fault diagnosis of hybrid colored Petri nets in Rodriguez-Urrego et al (2015), and applied to a digital electronic module, namely an insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT). Recently, and with the same objective as García et al (2008b), Trigos et al (2016) proposed a PN fault diagnosis approach to deal with both permanent and intermittent faults, where Petri nets are used for depicting the system behavior and building the PN diagnoser using a data acquisition system. In practice, a fault diagnosis algorithm is designed to perform this task.…”

“…In practice, a fault diagnosis algorithm is designed to perform this task. The proposed approach has been firstly applied to a liquid packaging process (Martínez and Moreno, 2008) to deal with permanent faults, and afterwards to an unmanned aerial vehicle (Trigos et al, 2016) to deal with intermittent faults.…”