Real-Time Safety Decision-Making Method for Multirotor Flight Strategies Based on TOPSIS Model

Abstract

Multirotors play an important role in electric power inspection, border control, modern agriculture, forest fire fighting, flood control, disaster prevention, etc. Multirotor failures, such as a communication fault, a sensor failure, or a power system anomaly, may well lead to mission interruption, multirotor crashes, and even casualties. To ensure flight safety, a multirotor decision module should be established to prevent or reduce the adverse effects caused by failure. Therefore, this paper proposes a real-time safety decision-making method for multirotor flight strategies based on the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). Firstly, the flight of the multirotor was simulated based on the Rflysim UAV flight simulation platform, and a fault-injection module was constructed to simulate different types of faults, so as to realize real-time monitoring of the flight status of the multirotor, and to collect flight data under various faults to establish condition assessment information sources. Then, based on the random forest algorithm, a failure level classification model of the multirotor was constructed, the model was trained and verified by inputting flight data of three types of safety level failures, and the model effectively classified the failure levels of the multirotor. Under this framework, a real-time safety decision-making model for the multirotor based on the TOPSIS model was constructed to realize the flight safety decision-making of the multirotor under different faults. This method can effectively realize the real-time decision-making for the flight strategy of a multirotor. By comparison with other models, the classification accuracy of the failure level classification model is higher, and the consideration of flight decision-making is more comprehensive and accurate, thus effectively ensuring the flight safety of the multirotor.