Fault diagnosis and recovery from structural failures (icing) in unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper tackles the problem of fault diagnosis and recovery of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) resulting from structural failures (icing). The proposed system consists of two units one for fault diagnosis and another for fault recovery. The goal of the fault diagnosis unit is to detect and estimate the severity of a fault. The recovery unit utilizes information on the estimated fault and adjusts the controller parameters to recover the system from the faulty condition. This methodology is useful mostly for small UAVs, where the available methods for structural fault detection and recovery are too expensive to be applied. Icing problem, which is a well-known structural problem in aerospace industry is considered as a demonstration of this method. Our proposed approach takes advantage of control theory to detect and recover faults within the flight control unit. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and practical use of our proposed approach.