Hierarchical Check Based Detection and Diagnosis of Sensor-Actuator Malfunction in Autonomous Systems: A Quadcopter Study

摘要

Future pervasive autonomous systems such as un-manned land and air vehicles will need to be extremely resilient to failures in sensors, actuators and on-board electronics for the purpose of overall vehicle safety. While detection of failures in sensors and actuators has been addressed in the past, direct application of prior error checking schemes to complex autonomous systems with multiple actuators is difficult. This is due to the large numbers of system state variables involved, the resulting degraded ability to perform accurate error detection and most importantly, loss of the ability to perform accurate error diagnosis. In this research, a hierarchical error checking scheme is presented that allows errors in centralized as well as distributed control of autonomous systems to be detected with high accuracy and low latency while allowing error diagnosis down to individual sensor-actuator subsystems. Checking mechanisms for subsystems as well as centralized control are synthesized so as to ensure coverage of all sensors and actuator errors. The viability of the proposed technique is demonstrated using a quadcopter flight control system. High error coverage and diagnosis down to critical sensor-actuator subsystems is demonstrated.