Systematic fault tolerant control based on adaptive Thau observer estimation for quadrotor UAVs

A systematic fault tolerant control (FTC) scheme based on fault estimation for a quadrotor actuator, which integrates normal control, active and passive FTC and fault parking is proposed in this paper. Firstly, an adaptive Thau observer (ATO) is presented to estimate the quadrotor rotor fault magnitudes, and then faults with different magnitudes and time-varying natures are rated into corresponding fault severity levels based on the pre-defined fault-tolerant boundaries. Secondly, a systematic FTC strategy which can coordinate various FTC methods is designed to compensate for failures depending on the fault types and severity levels. Unlike former stand-alone passive FTC or active FTC, our proposed FTC scheme can compensate for faults in a way of condition-based maintenance (CBM), and especially consider the fatal failures that traditional FTC techniques cannot accommodate to avoid the crashing of UAVs. Finally, various simulations are carried out to show the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method.