Reliable Flight Control: Gravity-Compensation-First Principle

TL;DR

This paper introduces the gravity-compensation-first principle, inspired by human pilots, to enhance reliable flight control in UAVs, addressing limitations of existing fault-tolerant control methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel principle based on human pilot behavior to improve fault tolerance in UAV flight control systems.

Findings

Supports reliable control of quadcopters and tail-sitter UAVs.

Addresses limitations of passive and active fault-tolerant control.

Provides a new perspective inspired by human pilot strategies.

Abstract

Safety is always the priority in aviation. However, current state-of-the-art passive fault-tolerant control is too conservative to use; current state-of-the-art active fault-tolerant control requires time to perform fault detection and diagnosis, and control switching. But it may be later to recover impaired aircraft. Most designs depend on failures determined as a priori and cannot deal with fault, causing the original system's state to be uncontrollable. However, experienced human pilots can save a serve impaired aircraft as far as they can. Motivated by this, this paper develops a principle to try to explain human pilot behavior behind, coined the gravity-compensation-first principle. This further supports reliable flight control for aircraft such as quadcopters and tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicles.