Modeling and Diagnosis of a Mini Drone Helicopter

This paper illustrates several concepts related to the safety of autonomous vehicles. The studied prototype is a 4-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with an attitude central for system positioning, made of 3 rate gyros, 3 accelerometers and 3 magnetometers. The model of the UAV and of the attitude central unit are proposed and extended to allow studying the behavior of the system when sensor faults are present. The control performance degradation is illustrated when a communication network is used to link the controller, the actuators and the sensors. A method is proposed to detect magnetometer and accelerometer faults.