ATSUKF-Based Actuator Health Assessment Method for Quad-Copter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The actuator, which generally consists of motors, electrical regulations, and propellers, is the key component of the quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. During the operation of the UAV, actuators are prone to degrade performance and even cause serious failure, which affects the service quality and flight safety of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Therefore, timely and accurate monitoring and evaluation of the health condition of actuators is of great significance to ensure the mission reliability of UAVs. This paper proposes an Adaptive Two-stage Unscented Kalman Filter-based actuator health assessment method for Quadcopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Firstly, a state space equation is established based on dynamic analysis to characterize the degradation mechanism of the actuator. Then, by modifying the Two-stage Unscented Kalman Filter algorithm, the Adaptive Two-stage Unscented Kalman Filter algorithm is constructed by combining the filter divergence criterion and the covariance matching technique to implement the health assessment of actuators. Finally, experiments are carried out for different degradation scenarios to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.