Design of a flight controller to achieve improved fault tolerance

POSE CLAUDIO; LEONARDO GARBEROGLIO; EZEQUIEL PECKER MARCOSIG; IGNACIO MAS; JUAN GIRIBET

Elektron

FIUBA

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2022 vol. 6

2525-0159

In the last years, multirotor aerial vehicleshave gained popularity both as consumer products and inprofessional applications. Safety is one of the main concernsduring operation, and different approaches to fault tolerancehave been proposed and continue to be developed. For acontrol system to be able to handle off-nominal situations,failures must be properly detected and identified; therefore,a fault detection and identification algorithm is required.Also, the control loop has to be accordingly modified tocope with each particular failure in the best way possible.These algorithms usually run on the vehicle’s low-level flightcomputer, imposing on it a large additional computationalload. In this work, a fault detection and identification moduleis used to evaluate its impact in terms of additional processingtime on a flight computer based on the Cortex-M3 micro-controller. While a highly optimized version of the algorithmis able to run, it still suggests potential hardware limitationsfor expanding the system capabilities. The evaluation of thesame module on an improved flight computer design based ona Cortex-M7 micro-processor shows a significantly reducedfootprint in the overall performance, allowing for the additionof an augmented method for faster failure detection.