Fault tolerant control of a quadrotor based on incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion

Abstract

The multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have rapidly attracted interest of the researchers since they play a unique role in a variety of areas including the military, agriculture, rescue, and mining. Actuator fault or failure is inevitable during multi-rotor’s operations, which can endanger humans on the ground in addition to costly damage to the system itself. Therefore, this paper introduces a nonlinear controller algorithm for fault-tolerant control of a quadcopter with partial loss of actuator effectiveness. The introduced controller includes a cascade structure of the fast inner-loop dynamics and slow outer-loop dynamics. In the inner-loop part of the controller, an incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion controller is applied and a modified PID control algorithm is used in the outer-loop of the controller. Simulation results for different fault scenarios demonstrate that the proposed fault-tolerant controller approach can quickly adapt itself to the abrupt change due to the motor faults and tracks the desired inputs satisfactorily.