Fault-Tolerant Actuation Architectures for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Rising civilian applications that make use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) demand crucial precautions to minimize safety hazards. Future UAVs are expected to incorporate fault-tolerant architectures for critical on-board systems to ensure compliance with airworthiness certification. Reliability reports of in-service UAVs showed that flight control actuators are among the highest root-causes of UAVs mishaps. In this paper, the current state-of-the-art actuation architectures for UAVs are reviewed to identify technical requirements for certification. This work is part of a TEMA-UAV research project aimed at developing certifiable fault-Tolerant Electro-Mechanical Actuators for future UAVs.