Hybrid modeling based double-granularity fault detection and diagnosis for quadrotor helicopter

Fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) is an effective technology to assure the safety and reliability of quadrotor helicopters. However, there are still some unsolved problems in the existing FDD methods, such as the trade-offs between the accuracy and complexity of system models used for FDD, and the rarely explored structure faults in quadrotor helicopters. In this paper, a double-granularity FDD method is proposed based on the hybrid modeling of a quadrotor helicopter which has been developed in authors’ previous work. The hybrid model consists of a prior model and a set of non-parametric models. The coarse-granularity-level FDD is built on the prior model which can isolate the faulty channel(s); while the fine-granularity-level FDD is built on the nonparametric models which can isolate the faulty components in the faulty channel. In both coarse and fine granularity FDD procedures, principal component analysis (PCA) is adopted for online fault detection. Using such a double-granularity scheme, the proposed FDD method has inherent ability in detecting and diagnosing structure faults or failures in quadrotor helicopters. Experimental results conducted on a 3-DOF hover platform can demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed hybrid modeling technique and the hybrid model based FDD method.