Trajectory planning and replanning strategies applied to a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle

Abbas Chamseddine (1) , Youmin Zhang (2) , Camille-Alain Rabbath (3) , Didier Theilliol (4)

1 Dept. of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering
2 Dept. of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
3 Defence Research and Development Canada
4 CRAN - Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy

This paper considers the problem of trajectory planning/re-planning for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system. In the fault-free case, the objective is to find the profile of the trajectory to follow so that the system constraints are not violated. When actuator faults occur, trajectory re-planning changes the nominal trajectory so as to take into consideration the new control limitations induced by the occurred fault. Trajectory re-planning requires information about fault location and amplitude and thus unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is employed to detect the occurrence of the fault, isolate the location of the fault and identify the fault amplitude. The main objective is to design a trajectory planning/re-planning approach that can be implemented on real UAV systems with low computation capabilities. For this purpose, the reference trajectories are designed as second-order systems to be used with a flatness-based trajectory planning/re-planning method. The approach is successfully applied to a quadrotor UAV testbed at the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering of Concordia University.

Mots clés: Fault tolerant control (FTC); Actuator fault; UAV; Path Planning; Flatness

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique

Abbas Chamseddine, Youmin Zhang, Camille-Alain Rabbath, Didier Theilliol. Trajectory planning and replanning strategies applied to a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, 2012, 35 (5), pp.1667-1671. ⟨10.2514/1.56606⟩. ⟨hal-00736993⟩