Fault-tolerance for quadrotor-type UAVs

What is it about?

By adding redundant rotors to a quadrotor, fault-tolerant flight can be obtained. The paper explains how this is done through an approach called control allocation. Control allocation can be viewed as the dual problem of data fusion, that is, if the system is over-actuated, how does one choose which actuator to use to control the system. In the approach, following a failure in a rotor, the control is re-allocated through the remaining rotors.

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Why is it important?

Operation of quadrotor-type vehicles (popularly known as drones) is becoming common. However, a failure in a rotor results in loss of control of at least one degree-of-freedom of the vehicle. This has safety implications. This concern can be allayed by including additional rotors in a 5, 6 or 8 rotor configuration. In this paper, an 8 rotor configuration is used, but the principle is the same.