Failure Detection and Fault Tolerant Control of a Jet-Powered Flying Humanoid Robot

Failure detection and fault tolerant control are fundamental safety features of any aerial vehicle. With the emer-gence of complex, multi-body flying systems such as jet-powered humanoid robots, it becomes of crucial importance to design fault detection and control strategies for these systems, too. In this paper we propose a fault detection and control framework for the flying humanoid robot iRonCub in case of loss of one turbine. The framework is composed of a failure detector based on turbines rotational speed, a momentum-based flight control for fault response, and an offline reference generator that produces far-from-singularities configurations and accounts for self and jet exhausts collision avoidance. Simulation results with Gazebo and MATLAB prove the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

International Conference on Robotics and Automation