Multi-rotors face significant risks, as actuator failures at high altitudes can easily result in a crash and the robot's destruction. Therefore, rapid fault recovery in the event of an actuator failure is necessary for the fault-tolerant and safe operation of unmanned aerial robots. In this work, we present a fault recovery approach based on the unification of posture manipulation and thrust vectoring. The key contributions of this work are: 1) Derivation of two flight dynamics models (high-fidelity and reduced-order) that capture posture control and thrust vectoring. 2) Design of a controller based on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) and demonstration of fault recovery in simulation using a high-fidelity model of the Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot (M4) in Simscape.
@article{arxiv.2503.18307,
title = {NMPC-based Unified Posture Manipulation and Thrust Vectoring for Fault Recovery},
author = {Adarsh Salagame and Shashwat Pandya and Ioannis Mandralis and Eric Sihite and Alireza Ramezani and Morteza Gharib},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.18307},
year = {2025}
}