A Particle Filtering Approach for Fault Detection and Isolation of UAV IMU Sensors: Design, Implementation and Sensitivity Analysis

Sensor fault detection and isolation (SFDI) is a fundamental topic in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) development, where attitude estimation plays a key role in flight control systems and its accuracy is crucial for UAV reliability. In commercial drones with low maximum take-off weights, typical redundant architectures, based on triplex, can represent a strong limitation in UAV payload capabilities. This paper proposes an FDI algorithm for low-cost multi-rotor drones equipped with duplex sensor architecture. Here, attitude estimation involves two 9-DoF inertial measurement units (IMUs) including 3-axis accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers. The SFDI algorithm is based on a particle filter approach to promptly detect and isolate IMU faulted sensors. The algorithm has been implemented on a low-cost embedded platform based on a Raspberry Pi board. Its effectiveness and robustness were proved through experimental tests involving realistic faults on a real tri-rotor aircraft. A sensitivity analysis was carried out on the main algorithm parameters in order to find a trade-off between performance, computational burden and reliability.