Controllability and Design of Unmanned Multirotor Aircraft Robust to Rotor Failure

A new design method for multi-rotor aircraft with distributed electric propulsion is presented to ensure a property of robustness against rotor failure from the control perspective. Based on the concept of null controllability, a quality measure is derived to evaluate and quantify the performance of a given design with the consideration of rotor failure. An optimization problem whose cost function is based on the quality measure is formulated and its optimal solution identifies a set of optimal design parameters that maximizes an aircraft’s ability to control its attitude and hence its position. The effectiveness of the proposed design procedure is validated through the results of experimentation with the Autonomous Flying Ambulance model being developed at Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies.

[1]  Halim Alwi,et al.  Fault tolerant control of an octorotor using LPV based sliding mode control allocation , 2013, 2013 American Control Conference.

[2]  Heinrich H. Bülthoff,et al.  A Novel Overactuated Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: Modeling, Control, and Experimental Validation , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

[3]  Darius Burschka,et al.  Toward a Fully Autonomous UAV: Research Platform for Indoor and Outdoor Urban Search and Rescue , 2012, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[4]  Aníbal Ollero,et al.  A Ground Control Station for a Multi-UAV Surveillance System , 2013, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[5]  Sauro Longhi,et al.  Flight control of a quadrotor vehicle subsequent to a rotor failure , 2014 .

[6]  Davide Bicego,et al.  Modeling and control of FAST-Hex: A fully-actuated by synchronized-tilting hexarotor , 2016, 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[7]  Chase C. Murray,et al.  The flying sidekick traveling salesman problem: Optimization of drone-assisted parcel delivery , 2015 .

[8]  Daewon Lee,et al.  Design and development of a free-floating hexrotor UAV for 6-DOF maneuvers , 2014, 2014 IEEE Aerospace Conference.

[9]  Bill Crowther,et al.  Kinematic analysis and control design for a nonplanar multirotor vehicle , 2011 .

[10]  Gera Weiss,et al.  Quadrotor with a Dihedral Angle: on the Effects of Tilting the Rotors Inwards , 2015, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[11]  Raffaello D'Andrea,et al.  Stability and control of a quadrocopter despite the complete loss of one, two, or three propellers , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[12]  Quan Quan,et al.  Controllability Analysis for Multirotor Helicopter Rotor Degradation and Failure , 2015 .

[13]  Guangxun Du,et al.  Controllability Analysis and Degraded Control for a Class of Hexacopters Subject to Rotor Failures , 2015, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[14]  Raffaello D'Andrea,et al.  A controllable flying vehicle with a single moving part , 2016, 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[15]  Antonio Franchi,et al.  Control of statically hoverable multi-rotor aerial vehicles and application to rotor-failure robustness for hexarotors , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[16]  Ricardo Salvador Sánchez Peña,et al.  Analysis and design of a tilted rotor hexacopter for fault tolerance , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.

[17]  Soon-Jo Chung,et al.  Nonlinear Control of Autonomous Flying Cars with Wings and Distributed Electric Propulsion , 2018, 2018 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).

[18]  A. Krener,et al.  Nonlinear controllability and observability , 1977 .

[19]  Marc Pollefeys,et al.  PIXHAWK: A micro aerial vehicle design for autonomous flight using onboard computer vision , 2012, Auton. Robots.

[20]  Florian Holzapfel,et al.  Adaptive fault tolerant control allocation for a hexacopter system , 2016, 2016 American Control Conference (ACC).

[21]  Hyunchul Shim,et al.  Fault Tolerant Control of Hexacopter for Actuator Faults using Time Delay Control Method , 2016 .