Quadrotor Upset Recovery after Rotor Failure

Master Thesis (2019)
Author(s)

M.M.A. Baert (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)

Contributor(s)

Coen C. Visser – Mentor (TU Delft - Control & Simulation)

Faculty
Aerospace Engineering
Copyright
© 2019 Matthias Baert
More Info
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Publication Year
2019
Language
English
Copyright
© 2019 Matthias Baert
Graduation Date
08-07-2019
Awarding Institution
Delft University of Technology
Programme
Aerospace Engineering
Faculty
Aerospace Engineering
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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.

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