The mechanical simplicity, hover capabilities, and high agility of quadrotors lead to a fast adaption in the industry for inspection, exploration, and urban aerial mobility. On the other hand, the unstable and underactuated dynamics of quadrotors render them highly susceptible to system faults, especially rotor failures. In this work, we propose a fault-tolerant controller using nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) to stabilize and control a quadrotor subjected to the complete failure of a single rotor. Differently from existing works, which either rely on linear assumptions or resort to cascaded structures neglecting input constraints in the outer-loop, our method leverages full nonlinear dynamics of the damaged quadrotor and considers the thrust constraint of each rotor. Hence, this method could effectively perform upset recovery from extreme initial conditions. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments are conducted for validation, which demonstrates that the proposed NMPC method can effectively recover the damaged quadrotor even if the failure occurs during aggressive maneuvers, such as flipping and tracking agile trajectories.


    Access

    Download


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Nonlinear MPC for Quadrotor Fault-Tolerant Control


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2022-04-01


    Remarks:

    Nan, Fang; Sun, Sihao; Foehn, Philipp; Scaramuzza, Davide (2022). Nonlinear MPC for Quadrotor Fault-Tolerant Control. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 7(2):5047-5054.



    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    DDC:    629




    Fault-Tolerant Control for Quadrotor UAV via Backstepping Approach

    Zhang, Xiaobing / Zhang, Youmin / Su, Chun-Yi et al. | AIAA | 2010


    Fault tolerant control of a quadrotor using ℒ1 adaptive control

    Xu, Dan / Whidborne, James Ferris / Cooke, Alastair | Emerald Group Publishing | 2016


    FAULT-TOLERANT MAPPING AND LOCALIZATION FOR QUADROTOR UAVS

    Gilson, Maximillian / Gauthier, Jason / Garcia, Kaylee et al. | TIBKAT | 2021


    Fault-Tolerant Mapping and Localization for Quadrotor UAVs

    Gilson, Maximillian / Gauthier, Jason / Garcia, Kaylee et al. | AIAA | 2021