Actuator Fault Detection and Diagnosis for Quadrotors

This paper presents a method for fault detection and diagnosis of actuator loss of effectiveness for a quadrotor helicopter. This paper not only con-siders the detection of the actuator loss of effec-tiveness faults, but also addresses the diagnosis of the faults. The detection and estimation of the faults are performed by the Augmented Ex-tended Kalman Filter. The faults are modelled as random walk processes and are treated as ad-ditional states which makes the fault estimation unbiased. The estimated faults can be further used for Fault Tolerant Control. Simulation both without and with the occurrence of the actuator faults demonstrates the effectiveness of the pro-posed approach.