Fail-safe Flight of a Fully-Actuated Quadcopter in a Single Motor Failure
This addresses safety and reliability issues for drone operations, particularly in critical applications, but is incremental as it builds on existing fail-safe concepts with a specific platform.
The paper tackles the problem of maintaining full flight control in a quadcopter after a single motor failure by using a T3-Multirotor platform and actively controlling the center of gravity, with experimental results validating the strategy.
In this paper, we introduce a new quadcopter fail-safe flight solution that can perform the same four controllable degrees-of-freedom flight as a regular multirotor even when a single thruster fails. The new solution employs a novel multirotor platform known as the T3-Multirotor and utilizes a distinctive strategy of actively controlling the center of gravity position to restore the nominal flight performance. A dedicated control structure is introduced, along with a detailed analysis of the dynamic characteristics of the platform that change during emergency flights. Experimental results are provided to validate the feasibility of the proposed fail-safe flight strategy.