Fault Tolerant Control in Over-Actuated Hybrid Tilt-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Quad-planes combine hovering and vertical takeoff and landing capability with fast and efficient forward flight. Regular Quad-planes with dedicated pusher motor can be subject to gust disturbances, and are not well-equipped to deal with actuator faults. Dual-axis Tilt-Rotor quad-planes are more maneuverable due to their overactuation. This also increases their gust resilience and allows them to hover statically after actuator failures. The vehicle in this paper uses an Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI ) controller, combined with a nonlinear Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) Control Allocation (CA ) algorithm, which can also find hover solutions in the case of actuator failures. We investigate both a combined allocation of linear and angular accelerations, as well as a cascaded allocation scheme. Due to large required changes in roll and pitch angles, the cascaded approach is selected in this research. Introduction of a tertiary control effort term, separation of attitude and actuator command optimization and a simulated Fault Detection and Identification ( FDI) mechanism led to repeated successful recovery from a motor failure in hover. Position tracking was demonstrated under failure in the recon- figured flight condition. Index Terms- Tilt-rotor, dual-axis tilt, quad-plane, FTC, over- actuated, control allocation