Fault Tolerant Control of Hexacopter for Actuator Faults using Time Delay Control Method

A novel attitude tacking control method using Time Delay Control (TDC) scheme is developed to provide robust controllability of a rigid hexacopter in case of single or multiple rotor faults. When the TDC scheme is developed, the rotor faults such as the abrupt and/or incipient rotor faults are considered as model uncertainties. The kinematics, modeling of rigid dynamics of hexacopter, and design of stability and controllability augmentation system (SCAS) are addressed rigorously in this paper. In order to compare the developed control scheme to a conventional control method, a nonlinear numerical simulation has been performed and the attitude tracking performance has been compared between the two methods considering the single and multiple rotor faults cases. The developed control scheme shows superior stability and robust controllability of a hexacopter that is subjected to one or multiple rotor faults and external disturbance, i.e., wind shear, gust, and turbulence.