Fault Detection and Reconfiguration Strategies for Quadcopter Drones Deployed in Disaster Scenarios

This work aims to improve the reliability and safety of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during emergency operations, contributing to more efficient post-disaster and first aid response operations. Specifically, this goal is pursued by using an effective and robust fault detection and isolation (FDI) system for the sensors and actuators of an autonomous quadcopter drone. The proposed solution exploits a set-based approach to define a threshold logic for real-time fault detection and isolation. The effectiveness of the proposed FDI system was tested through several numerical simulations using a detailed numerical simulator built into the Matlab/Simulink environment.