Fault-Tolerant Trajectory Tracking Control of a Quadrotor Suffering a Complete Rotor Failure

The problem of fault-tolerant position tracking control is proposed for a quadrotor under a complete rotor failure in this paper, which sacrifices the yaw control due to the underactuation. The hierarchical control scheme consists of a model predictive control (MPC) method to track the reference trajectory by taking the actuator saturation into account, together with an incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) based inner controller to stabilize the reduced attitude of the quadrotor and eliminate the effect of external disturbance. A detailed aerodynamic model may be obtained from sensor measurements, which also reduces the model dependency of the INDI approach. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method, numerical simulations are carried out for a quadrotor under external disturbance, model uncertainty and a complete rotor failure.