A Control Performance Index for Multicopters Under Off-nominal Conditions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel control performance index for multicopters that estimates disturbances under off-nominal conditions to prevent loss of control, supported by simulations and experiments.

Contribution

It proposes a new degree of controllability and a control performance index that do not monitor controllers directly but assess disturbance effects to enhance safety.

Findings

The CPI effectively indicates control performance under disturbances.

The switching control framework improves multicopter safety.

Simulation and experiments validate the approach.

Abstract

In order to prevent loss of control (LOC) accidents,the real-time control performance monitoring problem is studied for multicopters. Different from the existing work, this paper does not try to monitor the performance of the controllers directly. In turn, the disturbances of multicopters under off-nominal conditions are estimated to affect a proposed index to tell the user whether the multicopter will be LOC or not. Firstly, a new degree of controllability (DoC) will be proposed for multicopters subject to control constrains and off-nominal conditions. Then a control performance index (CPI) is defined based on the new DoC to reflect the control performance for multicopters. Besides, the proposed CPI is applied to a new switching control framework to guide the control decision of multicopter under off-nominal conditions. Finally, simulation and experimental results show the effectiveness of the CPI and the proposed switching control framework.