Adaptive Fault Tolerant Control Allocation for a Hexacopter System

In this paper an adaptive fault tolerant control allocation for a linear static actuator model is presented. The method proposed here has the advantage of not relying on the exact knowledge of the fault and of avoiding the use of online optimization routines. This is done using adaptive control techniques and by reformulating the problem of the control allocation with unknown control effectiveness. Furthermore, the usual assumption of positive definiteness of the control effectiveness matrix is relaxed. The approach is applied to the position tracking problem of a hexacopter system. The control law is composed of a backstepping baseline controller and an adaptive augmentation. The goal of this extension is improving the robustness against degradation and failures of the propulsion system. Simulation results show the efficiency of the approach.