Article
Open Access
An input-dependent safety measure and fail-safe strategy for multicopters
1 Information Science Academy, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, Beijing 100041, China
2 School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Abstract

In order to prevent loss of control (LOC) accidents, the real-time safety measure problem is studied for multicopters. Unlike the existing work, this paper does not try to monitor the performance of the controllers by system states. In turn, the lumped disturbances of multicopters under off-nominal conditions on input are estimated to affect a proposed measure to show users whether a multicopter will be LOC. Firstly, a new degree of controllability (DoC) is proposed for multicopters subject to control constraints and off-nominal conditions. An input-dependent safety measure is then defined based on the new DoC to show the control performance for multicopters to ensure safety. Besides, the proposed measure is applied to a fail-safe strategy to guide the control decision of multicopter under off-nominal conditions. Finally, simulation and experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed measure and fail-safe strategy.

Keywords

multicopters; loss of control; safety measure; degree of controllability; health evaluation

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