Falut-Detection Design for Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Fault Detection (FD) plays a vital role in ensuring the safety of a flight-control system, especially that of an uninhabited aerial vehicle. An FD algorithm is designed to detect a situation in which a faulty condition has occurred in the system. The main theoretical contribution of this work is a new residual threshold function, which is input dependent and enhances the FD capabilities of highly uncertain systems. The combined FD algorithm and new threshold function were simulated in the laboratory, in a high-fidelity hardware-in-the-loop environment, and flight tested as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Software Enabled Control (SEC) Program. The DARPA SEC program is a research initiative designed to provide flight-control engineers with a reusable interface for the implementation of flight-control algorithms and flight management software on embedded systems.