Sensor fault detection and isolation in small-scale autonomous helicopters

This paper deals with the problem of Fault detection and isolation for a small-scale autonomous helicopter. By using the unobservable and unobservability subspace concept, the smallest unobservability subspace is constructed to describe the fault characteristics. The residual designed by geometric approach is only sensitive to single sensor. Our proposed method is then applied to an autonomous helicopter. The component of the gyroscope angular velocity sensor has been used as representative case of sensor fault detection and isolation for three fault types (stuck with constant bias, additive type and multiplicative type). Numerical examples for sensor faults are given to show the validness of our proposed fault detection and isolation algorithm.