Uma estratégia de fail-safe para veículos aéreos não-tripulados: teoria e experimentos

Abstract

The growing interest on service robotics with the use and exploitation of unmanned aerial vehicles has raised important questions related to safety and fail prevention during navigation. In this context, the present thesis, initially exposes data that show a increase UAV’s civil use for different purposes. From this information, we discuss about the eligibility of owners and drivers of these devices, the legality of UAV’s flight on private property in the light of Law 10257 of 2001 and the effects these can cause after a possible failure in its control system or in its structure. After such arguments, investigates the dynamics of an unmanned aerial vehicle of quadrotor type using PID SISO controllers before a scenario of total failure in two opposite engines and analyses its navigation condition after such a failure. Thus, it is proposed and discussed from simulations and experiments using a real quadcopter, a strategy to mitigate the mentioned failure by a automatic landing with an exponential decay profile. This strategy aims to minimize the horizontal divagation assumed by equipment failure and promotes rapid landing, but ensuring the contact time of this with the ground and reduced vertical speed. At the end, from the experiments, the feasibility is found to board the proposed strategy commercially available aircraft, since the effects of the fault from two opposite motors are substantially attenuated.