Sensor Based Active Fault Tolerant Controller for Hexacopters

Munjaal Bhatt∗¹    Aakash Maniar∗¹    Aditya Mulgundkar∗¹    Deepak Gangadharan†²    Harikumar Kandath ∗¹   

¹ Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad, India    ² Computer Systems Group, IIIT Hyderabad   

n this work, we conduct performance analysis of a Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) scheme for hexacopter actuator failure through hardware-based fault detection and dynamic control reallocation. Hall effect sensors are used to monitor motor speeds and compared with the reference signals generated by the flight controller (FC) for anomaly detection. Experimental flight tests demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed FTC in detecting the faults and subsequent flight stabilization. The performance of the proposed FTC (quantified in terms of tracking error in attitude dynamics) is compared with the ideal fault detection (no delay between fault occurrence and control reallocation) case