Universal adaptive fault-tolerant control of a multicopter UAV

This paper presents a universal adaptive fault-tolerant control (FTC) design for multicopter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The proposed architecture consists of a two-loop control structure: a fault-tolerant controller generates normalized virtual control inputs to track the desired trajectory subject to actuator faults, and an adaptive augmentation controller deals with system uncertainties and also balances the design requirements for specific platform. The FTC approach is based on gain-scheduling control in the framework of structured H∞ synthesis. In order to implement the overall control system on most types of multicopter UAVs, an adaptive mapping algorithm is proposed. High fidelity simulations and experimental results, performed on various multicopters with different payload and configuration, show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach in accommodating different levels of actuator degradation including total failures of the rotors as well as unknown mass and inertia, all using a single controller with fixed coefficients.