Actuator Fault-Tolerant Control Architecture for Multirotor Vehicles in Presence of Disturbances

Abstract

In this article we present an actuator fault-tolerant control architecture for the attitude and altitude tracking problem of multirotor aircrafts, under the effects of unknown drag coefficients and external wind. The tracking problem is faced by splitting it into two sub-problems, namely control law and control allocation. The control law is designed in terms of desired forces and moments which should act on the system, it does permit to exploit possible estimations of the disturbances acting on the vehicle and does not depend on the multirotor configuration. The control allocation, instead, optimally solves the redistribution of the control efforts among the motors according to the specific multirotor configuration, moreover it can actively cope with actuator faults whenever their estimations are available. Numerical simulations based on realistic scenarios confirm that the control architecture permits to solve the attitude and altitude tracking problem, despite the effects of faults and disturbances on the system.