Control Allocation Switching Scheme for Fault Tolerant Control of Hexacopter

A control allocation switching method is proposed for hexacopter control considering actuator faults. The proposed method is a two-stage switching scheme, consisting of a projection-based adaptive control allocation and a constrained optimisation-based control allocation. The proposed method switches control allocation algorithms from the adaptive control allocation to the optimisation-based control allocation when the actuator of the hexacopter is saturated. The switching criterion decides the switching timing so that the control allocation is robust for the delay of fault detection and isolation module. Numerical simulation demonstrates that the proposed method can effectively perform actuator-fault tolerant position control of the hexacopter without actuator saturation and consume less control effort compared with existing one-stage control allocation algorithms.