Fault tolerance control for quad-rotor UAV using gain-scheduling in Matlab/Gazebo

Abstract

Nowadays, multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are deployed widely in different fields to serve multiple purposes. Safety and reliability of multi-rotor system are rapidly growing research area, and enhancing the control design to account for system failure. In this paper, the Fault-Tolerance Control (FTC) is introduced as a method for recovery from failure in quad-rotor UAV actuator in hovering mode. The ultimate aim is to land safely with minimal damage. This research focuses on designing a FTC method that is capable of handling one and/or two rotors failures. Two different controllers are designed and implemented in simulation for controlling the UAV which are Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control and Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). LQR shows its effectiveness after comparing both methods responses. Furthermore, a state observer is designed using Linear Quadratic Estimator (LQE). Gain scheduling (GS) method is developed to switch between the controllers of the system in the event of failure. The GS-PID control design is validated in ROS/Gazebo using the new Robotics System Toolbox showing the effectiveness of the proposed method.