Estimation of actuator faults in quadrotor vehicles: from theory to validation with experimental flight data

In this paper, we propose the experimental validation of a fault observer which allows to reconstruct the time behaviour of an injected fault effect on a quadrotor actuator. The observer is firstly presented, designed, and its stability property analyzed for independent multiplicative faults/failures on each actuator. Then, the experimental setup is described, taking into consideration the adopted hardware and software implementation, both of them based on commercial and easy to plug-in components. Parameter estimation is also considered in order to obtain numerical evaluations of all the unknown constants of the actual physical system. For the considered experimental setup, the results confirm the validity of the proposed observer, within an acceptance tolerance.