Design of a flight controller to achieve improved fault tolerance

In the last years, multirotor aerial vehicles have gained popularity both as consumer products and in professional applications. Safety is one of the main concerns during operation, and different approaches to fault tolerance have been proposed and continue to be developed. For a control system to b...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Pose, Claudio Daniel, Garberoglio, Leonardo, Pecker Marcosig, Ezequiel, Mas, Ignacio Agustin, Giribet, Juan Ignacio
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2022
Country:Argentina
Institution:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repository:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/202281
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/202281
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:FLIGHT COMPUTER
UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES
FAULT TOLERANCE
FAULT DETECTION AND IDENTIFICATION
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/2.2
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/2
Description
Summary:In the last years, multirotor aerial vehicles have gained popularity both as consumer products and in professional applications. Safety is one of the main concerns during operation, and different approaches to fault tolerance have been proposed and continue to be developed. For a control system to be able to handle off-nominal situations, failures must be properly detected and identified; therefore, a fault detection and identification a lgorithm i s required. Also, the control loop has to be accordingly modified to cope with each particular failure in the best way possible. These algorithms usually run on the vehicle’s low-level flight computer, imposing on it a large additional computational load. In this work, a fault detection and identification module is used to evaluate its impact in terms of additional processing time on a flight c omputer b ased o n t he C ortex-M3 microcontroller. While a highly optimized version of the algorithm is able to run, it still suggests potential hardware limitations for expanding the system capabilities. The evaluation of the same module on an improved flight c omputer design b ased on a Cortex-M7 micro-processor shows a significantly reduced footprint in the overall performance, allowing for the addition of an augmented method for faster failure detection.