A fault tolerant control strategy for quadrotor UAVs based on trajectory linearization approach

Fault tolerant control on quadrotors has recently gained more and more attention. A proper fault tolerant control strategy can improve the vehicle´s performance in the presence of benign faults, and even save the vehicle and valuable payload in case of severe faults. This paper presents a new fault tolerant control strategy based on Trajectory Linearization Control approach with a special method of transformation from quadrotor mode to tri-rotor mode, and an introduction of extra control DOF. Meanwhile, control command saturation is considered in the proposed fault tolerant control strategy. The maximum fault tolerant capacity for the nominal controller is estimated and specific control strategies are presented according to fault classification. Simulations in the SIMULINK/MATLAB environment are presented to verify the control strategy.