Diagnosis of Airspeed Measurement Faults for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Airspeed sensor faults are common causes for incidents with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with pitot tube clogging or icing being the most common causes. Timely diagnosis of such faults or other artifacts in signals from airspeed sensing systems could potentially prevent crashes. This paper employs parameter adaptive estimators to provide analytical redundancies and a dedicated diagnosis scheme is designed. Robustness is investigated on sets of flight data to estimate distributions of test statistics. The result is robust diagnosis with adequate balance between false alarm rate and fault detectability.