Passive Fault-Tolerant Control of a 2-DOF Robotic Helicopter

The presence of faults in dynamic systems causes the potential loss of some of the control objectives. For that reason, a fault-tolerant controller is required to ensure a proper operation, as well as to reduce the risk of accidents. The present work proposes a passive fault-tolerant controller that is based on robust techniques, which are utilized to adjust a proportional-derivative scheme through a linear matrix inequality. In addition, a nonlinear term is included to improve the accuracy of the control task. The proposed methodology is implemented in the control of a two degrees of a freedom robotic helicopter in a simulation environment, where abrupt faults in the actuators are considered. Finally, the proposed scheme is also tested experimentally in the Quanser® 2-DOF Helicopter, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed controller.