A Robust Fault Diagnosis for Quad-Rotors: A Sliding-Mode Observer Approach

This article presents the design of a fault diagnosis strategy to deal with faults in multiple actuators in a quad-rotor under the influence of external disturbances. The faults are modeled as partial loss of effectiveness. The proposed fault diagnosis strategy is based on a finite-time sliding-mode observer that estimates the full state and provides a set of residuals using only the output information. Moreover, such a strategy is able to detect, isolate, and identify faults in multiple actuators despite the presence of external disturbances. Experimental results on the Quanser’s QBall 2 platform show the performance of the proposed scheme.