Failure Detection in Quadcopter UAVs Using K-Means Clustering

We propose an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) failure detection system as the first step of a three-step autonomous emergency landing safety framework for UAVs. We showed the effectiveness and feasibility of using vibration data with the k-means clustering algorithm in detecting mid-flight UAV failures for that purpose. Specifically, we measured vibration signals for different faulty propeller cases during several test flights, utilizing a custom-made hardware system. After we made the vibration graphs and extracted the data, we investigated to determine the combination of acceleration and gyroscope parameters that results in the best accuracy of failure detection in quadcopter UAVs. Our investigations show that considering the gyroscope parameter in the vertical direction (gZ) along with the accelerometer parameter in the same direction (aZ) results in the highest accuracy of failure detection for the purpose of emergency landing of faulty UAVs, while ensuring a quick detection and timely engagement of the safety framework. Based on the parameter set (gZ-aZ), we then created scatter plots and confusion matrices, and applied the k-means clustering algorithm to the vibration dataset to classify the data into three health state clusters-normal, faulty, and failure. We confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system with flight experiments, in which we were able to detect faults and failures utilizing the aforementioned clusters in real time.