A Physics-Based Safety Recovery Approach for Fault-Resilient Multi-Quadcopter Coordination

TL;DR

This paper introduces a physics-based, multi-layer control strategy for fault-resilient quadcopter coordination, enabling safe recovery from failures through high-level trajectory planning and low-level control, validated by simulations.

Contribution

It presents a novel physics-inspired guidance and control framework for fault recovery in multi-quadcopter systems, combining fluid dynamics concepts with bounded control design.

Findings

Effective recovery trajectories are generated that respect rotor speed limits.

The control approach maintains safety constraints during fault recovery.

Simulations demonstrate the method's robustness and efficiency.

Abstract

This paper develops a novel physics-based approach for fault-resilient multi-quadcopter coordination in the presence of abrupt quadcopter failure. Our approach consists of two main layers: (i) high-level physics-based guidance to safely plan the desired recovery trajectory for every healthy quadcopter and (ii) low-level trajectory control design by choosing an admissible control for every healthy quadcopter to safely recover from the anomalous situation, arisen from quadcopter failure, as quickly as possible. For the high-level trajectory planning, first, we consider healthy quadcopters as particles of an irrotational fluid flow sliding along streamline paths wrapping failed quadcopters in the shared motion space. We then obtain the desired recovery trajectories by maximizing the sliding speeds along the streamline paths such that the rotor angular speeds of healthy quadcopters do not exceed certain upper bounds at all times during the safety recovery. In the low level, a feedback linearization control is designed for every healthy quadcopter such that quadcopter rotor angular speeds remain bounded and satisfy the corresponding safety constraints. Simulation results are given to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed method.