Fault tolerance analysis of a hexarotor with reconfigurable tilted rotors

CLAUDIO POSE; JUAN I. GIRIBET; IGNACIO MAS

Paris

Congreso; 2020 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA); 2020

IEEE

Tilted rotors in multirotor vehicles have shown tobe useful for different practical reasons. For instance, increasingyaw maneuverability or enabling full position and attitudecontrol of hexarotor vehicles. It has also been proven that ahexagon-shaped multirotor is capable of complete attitude andaltitude control under failures of one of its rotors. However,when a rotor fails, the torque that can be reached in the worst-case direction decreases considerably.This work proposes to actively change the tilt angle of the ro-tors when a failure occurs. This rotor reconfiguration increasesthe maximum torque that can be achieved in the most stressfuldirection, reducing maneuverability limitations. Experimentalvalidations are shown, where the proposed reconfigurable tiltedrotor is used in order to control a hexarotor vehicle whena failure appears mid-flight. The impact of the delay in thereconfiguration when a failure occurs is also addressed.