Fault-tolerant multirotor UAVs (Details) / Fehlertolerante Multicopter

Описание: Diagnosis and reconfiguration of actuator failures (rotor losses) of hexrotors. Developed and applied at the institute of Automation and Computer Control at the facutly of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

More information here:
https://www.ei.rub.de/fakultaet/news/...
http://www.atp.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/n/v...

In this video it is impressive to see how fast an autonomous diagnosis unit is able to identify the failed rotor. The reconfiguration starts before the rotor loss can be seen by a human and before a significant deviation from the hover flight is occured. This is necessary because otherwise the UAV is not able to compensate the deviation without further special modification of the control structure or the control law.

It is important to notice that before the start of the UAV no information about the failure is given. The system autonomously detects and isolates the failure by an observation of measurement data and starts the calcutlation of a modified control law for the flight controller. Everything in real-time during the flight.

In contrast to other videos that can be found here on YouTube, we consider the complete loss of a rotor and are able stablize all system dynamics in a hexrotor system (5 rotors left).

The reconfiguration task is different if a rotor degradation is considered or some dynamics (like yaw control) are ignored after fault occurrance. The reconfiguration task is a bit easier if an octorotor is considered, which is at least a double quadrotor frame. Here, four rotors obviously can be switched off and the result is the geometry of a quadrotor.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Diagnose und Rekonfiguration von Aktorausfällen an Multikoptern. Erforscht und erprobt am Lehrstuhl für Automatisierungstechnik und Prozessinformatik der Fakultät für Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum.