Adaptive Fault-tolerant Control of Six-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper studies the flight dynamics modeling of six-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles and designs an adaptive fault-tolerant controller via state feedback referring to the model. The method enables six-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles to not only land safely, but also to hover and propel normally when the motors are stuck or blocked. Based on the on-line estimation of eventual faults, the adaptive fault-tolerant controller parameters are updating automatically to compensate the fault effects on the system. By using the framework of linear matrix inequality(LMI) approach, the proposed algorithm enhances the security and robustness of the system.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the recent years, as rookies in the field of aviation products, six-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles have rapidly been in a hot research internationally with distinctive characteristics [1], [2]. With the increasing applications in various fields, people put forward higher requirements for the reliability and safety. Six-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles achieve the attitude control by coordinating and changing the lift of each rotor. The lift depends on the speed of motors. During the flight of six-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles, the flight attitude will be affected seriously by external interference or motor failures. Therefore, it has the important research significance for improving the fault-tolerant and anti-interference ability of six-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles.