Controllability Analysis and Degraded Control for a Class of Hexacopters Subject to Rotor Failures
This addresses fault tolerance for hexacopters in applications like drones, but it is incremental as it builds on existing controllability analysis with a specific degraded control approach.
The paper tackled the problem of hexacopter controllability after rotor failures, showing that the system becomes uncontrollable with one rotor failure despite being over-actuated, and proposed a fault-tolerant control strategy by ignoring yaw states, with simulations and experiments confirming feasibility.
This paper considers the controllability analysis and fault tolerant control problem for a class of hexacopters. It is shown that the considered hexacopter is uncontrollable when one rotor fails, even though the hexacopter is over-actuated and its controllability matrix is row full rank. According to this, a fault tolerant control strategy is proposed to control a degraded system, where the yaw states of the considered hexacopter are ignored. Theoretical analysis indicates that the degraded system is controllable if and only if the maximum lift of each rotor is greater than a certain value. The simulation and experiment results on a prototype hexacopter show the feasibility of our controllability analysis and degraded control strategy.