Quadrotor Upset Recovery after Rotor Failure

Master thesis (2019)

Authors

M.M.A. Baert Aerospace Engineering

Contributors

C.C. de Visser (mentor)
Faculty
Aerospace Engineering, Aerospace Engineering
Copyright: © 2019 Matthias Baert
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

08-07-2019

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Aerospace Engineering

Abstract

A fault-tolerant controller is presented that is able to recover a quadrotor from an upset condition in the case of a single rotor failure. With only 3 rotors the quadrotor is not fully controllable anymore, however by using precession the quadrotor can be made controllable again in roll and pitch. A step-by-step recovery strategy is proposed in which controllability is actively recovered before recovery of attitude and altitude. Control allocation is based on the Incremental Non-Linear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) principle and takes rotor saturation into account by solving a constrained quadratic optimisation problem. The controller is validated in a real life test environment where the quadrotor is thrown into the air with only 3 propellers from which it has to recover using the techniques presented in this paper.