Nonlinear MPC with Motor Failure Identification and Recovery for Safe and Aggressive Multicopter Flight

Understand

Safe and precise reference tracking is a crucial characteristic of MAVs that have to operate under the influence of external disturbances in cluttered environments.

• In this paper, we present a NMPC that exploits the fully physics based non-linear dynamics of the system.
• We furthermore show how the moment and thrust control inputs can be transformed into feasible actuator commands.
• In order to guarantee safe operation despite potential loss of a motor under which we show our system keeps operating safely, we developed an EKF based motor failure identification algorithm.