Fault-Tolerant Control of an Hexarotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Applying Outdoor Tests and Experiments

Abstract This paper presents a fault-tolerant control approach for actuators failures in multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles UAVs. The strategy is applied on an hexarotor UAV. First, the hexarotor model is derived by means of the Newton-Euler formalism. A Controllability study based on the modified Kalman Rank condition is presented in case of one or more failing motors. A control allocation based recovery strategy is applied on the hexarotor when it is controllable. The control allocation problem is stated using a parametric programming formulation and is solved for an explicit solution. Outdoor real-time experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the applied strategy.