Reconfigurable Fault-Tolerant Tilt-Rotor Quadcopter System

In this paper, fault-tolerance characteristics of a reconfigurable tilt-rotor quadcopter upon a propeller failure are presented. Traditional quadcopters experience instability and asymmetry about yaw-axis upon a propeller failure but the design and control strategy presented here can handle a complete propeller failure during flight. Fault-tolerance is achieved by means of structural and flight controller reconfiguration. The concept involves conversion of a tilt-rotor UAV into a T-copter. The dynamics and control of the tilt-rotor quadcopter are presented for ideal flight condition and for the reconfigured system in case of propeller failure. Analytical solution for trim flight conditions yielding zero angular rates for the UAV is derived. It has been shown that the structurally reconfigured UAV is controllable and completes the flight mission without much compromise in flight performance. The controllability and observability analysis of the reconfigured system is shown by state space formulation. The flight controllers for both dynamic models are analyzed and the applicability of the proposed concept is presented by propeller failure simulation during the way-point navigation.