Rotation modulation is an effective method to enhance the accuracy of an inertial navigation system (INS) by modulating the gyroscope drifts and accelerometer bias errors into periodically varying components. The typical RINS drives the inertial measurement unit (IMU) rotation along the vertical axis and the horizontal sensors’ errors are modulated, however, the azimuth angle error is closely related to vertical gyro drift, and the vertical gyro drift also should be modulated effectively. In this paper, a new rotation strategy in a dual-axis rotational INS (RINS) is proposed and the drifts of three gyros could be modulated, respectively. Experimental results from a real dual-axis RINS demonstrate that the maximum azimuth angle error is decreased from 0.04° to less than 0.01° during 1 h. Most importantly, the changing of rotation strategy leads to some additional errors in the velocity which is unacceptable in a high-precision INS. Then the paper studies the basic reason underlying horizontal velocity errors in detail and a relevant new calibration method is designed. Experimental results show that after calibration and compensation, the fluctuation and stages in the velocity curve disappear and velocity precision is improved.

Flight safety is of vital importance for tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which can take off and land vertically as well as cruise at high speed, especially in different kinds of complex environment. As being the executor of the flight control, the actuator failure will directly affect the controllability of the tilt-rotor UAV, and it has high probability of causing fatal personal injury and financial loss. However, due to the limitation of weight and cost, small UAVs cannot be equipped with redundant actuators. Therefore, there is an urgent need of fault detection and diagnosis method for the actuators. In this paper, an actuator fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) method based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and multiple-model adaptive estimation (MMAE) is proposed. The actuator deflections are added to the state vector and estimated using EKF. The fault diagnosis algorithm of MMAE could assign a conditional probability to each faulty actuator according to the residual of EKF and diagnose the fault. This paper is structured as follows: first, the structure and model of tilt-rotor UAV actuator are established. Then, EKF observers are introduced to estimate the state vector and to calculate residual sequences caused by different faulty actuators. The residuals from EKFs are used by fault diagnosis algorithm to assign a conditional probability to each failure condition, and fault type can be diagnosed according to the probabilities. The FDD method is verified by simulations, and the results demonstrate that the FDD algorithm could accurately and efficiently diagnose actuator fault without any additional sensor.

The wind field has a great influence on the control stability of Tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), especially during the take-off and landing phase. The airspeed of UAV is so small during these phases that it cannot generate stable aerodynamic forces, which will significantly reduce the wind robustness of Tilt-rotor UAV. In this paper, the disturbance of wind field is analyzed from two perspectives: the wind field acting on the UAV fuselage, which is regarded as external interference, and the wind acting on the propeller, which is considered as modeling error. After analyzing the interference mechanism of wind field, a generalized extended state observer (GESO) and a H∞ robust control method with mixed sensitivity are proposed, which could empower the Tilt-rotor UAV with good interference suppression ability as well as better performance tracking ability. Finally, the laboratory simulation and flight experiment are studied. The results validate the theory and prove that the proposed method could resist the interference of wind field and shows excellent control effect.

The airspeed is an important feedback signal for flight control, and its measurement accuracy is related to the safety of aircraft, especially for hybrid vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the transition phase. However, offline calibration of the pitot tube cannot fully simulate the situation in real cases, and this is why online calibration after installation is necessary. In addition, the environmental wind field creates a high risk for the conversion flight of a hybrid UAV, thus real-time wind field measurement of the flight field has great significance for the flight path planning of the conversion process. In this article, an innovative method for online calibration of pitot tube and wind field estimation is proposed. After establishing the extended Kalman filter (EKF) for estimation, an analysis method is proposed to analyze the observability of EKF under different flight strategies. Then, the hovering flight is selected as the experimental flight trajectory. The laboratory computer simulation and flight experiment results validate the theory and prove that the proposed method could re-calibrate the scale factor of the pitot tube and estimate the wind field.

A secure control system is of great importance for unmanned aerial vehicles, especially in the condition of fault data injection. As the source of the feedback control system, the Inertial navigation system/Global position system (INS/GPS) is the premise of flight control system security. However, unmanned aerial vehicles have the requirement of lightweight and low cost for airborne equipment, which makes redundant device object unrealistic. Therefore, the method of fault detection and diagnosis is desperately needed. In this paper, a fault detection and diagnosis method based on fuzzy system and neural network is proposed. Fuzzy system does not depend on the mathematical model of the process, which overcomes the difficulties in obtaining the accurate model of unmanned aerial vehicles. Neural network has a strong self-learning ability, which could be used to optimize the membership function of fuzzy system. This paper is structured as follows: first, a Kalman filter observer is introduced to calculate the residual sequences caused by different sensor faults. Then, the sequences are transmitted to the fault detection and diagnosis system and fault type can be obtained. The proposed fault detection and diagnosis algorithm was implemented and evaluated with real datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect the sensor faults successfully with high levels of accuracy and efficiency.

The integrated navigation of inertial navigation systems (INS) and the Global Positioning System (GPS) is essential for small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as multicopters, providing steady and accurate position, velocity, and attitude information. Nevertheless, decreasing navigation accuracy is a serious threat to flight safety due to the long-term drift error of INS in the absence of GPS measurements. To bridge the GPS outage for multicopters, this paper proposes a novel navigation reconstruction method for small multicopters, which combines the vehicle dynamic model and micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensors. Firstly, an induced drag model is introduced into the dynamic model of the vehicle, and an efficient online parameter identification method is designed to estimate the model parameters quickly. Secondly, the body velocity can be calculated from the vehicle model and accelerometer measurement. In addition, the nongravitational acceleration estimated from body velocity and radar height are utilized to yield a more accurate attitude estimate. Fusing the information of the attitude, body velocity, magnetic heading, and radar height, a navigation system based on an error-state Kalman filter is reconstructed. Then, an adaptive measurement covariance algorithm based on a fuzzy logic system is designed to reduce the weight due to the disturbed acceleration. Finally, the hardware-in-loop experiment is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Simulation results show that the proposed navigation reconstruction algorithm aided by the vehicle model can significantly improve navigation accuracy during a GPS outage.